2,500 years of wild climate change in southern Europe: It was warmer in Roman Times than now

By Jo Nova

Nothing at all about the modern era stands out as unusual

Thanks to David Whitehouse at NetZeroWatch who has found a remarkable paper: Pyrenean caves reveal a warmer past

The new study on stalagmites in caves of the Pyrenees shows that modern climate change is nothing compared to normal fluctuations in the last 2,500 years, when it was at times much hotter, colder, and more volatile. Rapid shifts between temperatures were common.

The researchers looked at 8 stalagmites in 4 caves and local lake levels, but they also compared their results with other European temperature proxies and reconstructions and the pattern is consistent across the region. The Roman Warm Period was much hotter than today, and for hundreds of years as well, even though coal plants were rare. Apparently, there was a reason Romans were dressed in togas.

The Dark Ages were very cold, especially around 520 – 550AD — which may be related to what the researchers call a “cataclysmic” volcanic eruption that took place in Iceland in 536AD. It was followed by two other massive volcanic eruptions in 540 and 547AD. This effect is apparently visible in European tree rings which showed “an unprecedented, long-lasting […]

In 1978 we were heading toward another ice age

Spock (Leonard Nimoy) was warning people about the next ice age coming in 1978:

The world has cooled for the last 3,000 years. The glaciers have expanded. Temperatures have fallen dramatically in the last 30 years. If we are not prepared for the coming ice age, we’ll see hunger and death on an unprecedented scale….

In the documentary below there is footage of the “perilous state of Buffalo” in 1976/77 when it was hit with savage cold and snow (from about 13 minutes in). Today (in 2022) news is coming in from Buffalo, NY which has just had 5 feet of snow fall.



Vimeo

Every 30 years the herd may panic in a different direction…

News cycles follow the natural ones (and the money). So at the depths of the cooling from WWII to the 1970s there were ice-age stories. Then came the warming stories, and the IPCC extrapolates a thirty year trend to infinity…

Graph by Syan Akasofu

hat tip to Climate Depot

 

9.8 out of 10 based on 88 ratings […]

Denying 2000 years of the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age on every continent

Here we go again. For five or so years believers didn’t really mention the Medieval Warm Period. Too bruised by the embarrassment of Hockey Stick Zombie failures. But it’s an inconvenient era they have to rub out because none of the expert models can explain what caused it, and it’s hard to panic about same temperatures that Edward the Confessor survived with oxen and carts.

And it’s hard to call the modern warmth “man-made” if nature created something just like it 1,000 years ago.

Climate change: We haven’t experienced anything like this in the past 2,000 years

By Michael Collett, ABC, Environmental Copy and Paste Promoter

Climate scientists writing in the journal Nature have found there is no evidence for “globally coherent warm and cold periods” over the past 2,000 years prior to industrialisation.

That’s significant, because climate change deniers have sometimes pointed to epochs like the so-called “Little Ice Age” or “Medieval Warm Period” to argue that the current global warming is one among multiple similar global climate events.

But what the research actually shows is that other “peak warming and cooling events” over the past two millennia appear to have […]

Antarctica was warmer one thousand years ago — and life was OK

Remember when polar amplification was the rage? So much for that theory

Antarctica is twice the size of the US or Australia. Buried 2 km deep under domes of snow, it holds 58 meters of global sea level to ransom. The IPCC have been predicting its demise-by-climate-change for a decade or two.

A new paper looks at 60 sites across Antarctica, considering everything from ice, lake and marine cores to peat and seal skins. They were particularly interested in the Medieval Warm Period, and researched back to 600AD. During medieval times (1000-1200 AD) they estimate Antarctica as a whole was hotter than it is today. Antarctica was even warmer still — during the dark ages circa 700AD.

Credit to the paper authors: Sebastian Lüning, Mariusz Gałka, and Fritz Vahrenholt

Feast your eyes on the decidedly not unprecedented modern tiny spike:

….

The little jaggy down after 2000 AD is real. While there was rapid warming across Antarctica from 1950-2000, in the last twenty years, that warming has stalled. Just another 14 million square kilometers that the models didn’t predict.

We already knew the Medieval Warm Period was a global phenomenon, thanks to hundreds of proxies, and 6,000 boreholes. But […]

Evil whites caused the Little Ice Age by bringing small-pox to America

Is it April 1st in London?

The BBC is reporting that academics from University College London have discovered that the Little Ice Age was not caused by the record low solar activity of the Maunder Minima, instead it was due to the colonization of the Americas. Thanks mostly to measles and small pox the death toll was so enormous that about 9% of the global population died, supposedly leaving empty farmlands. These were swiftly covered in forests causing a deadly fall in CO2 which cooled the world.

This is an Apocryphal story that virtue signals in so many ways. A kind of triple-point scrabble maneuver combining climate, race, war, forests and imperial colonization in the one story.

The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas caused the Little Ice Age

Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth’s climate.

That’s the conclusion of scientists from University College London, UK.

The team says the disruption that followed European settlement led to a huge swathe of abandoned agricultural land being reclaimed by fast-growing trees and other vegetation.

This pulled down enough carbon […]

Worst Storm Ever: Over 8,000 people killed in UK in extreme storm that lasted nine days (in 1703)

Cropped from The Great Storm by Goodwin Sands, 1703

While we soak in storm footage this week, imagine this storm!

Back when CO2 levels were ideal, the UK was hit by a monster nine-day storm: at least 8,000 dead, maybe as many as 15,000 people. Some 2,000 chimney stacks were blown down and 4,000 oak trees were lost in the New Forest alone. About 400 windmills were destroyed, with “the wind driving their wooden gears so fast that some burst into flames”. The worst toll was probably on ships — with some 6,000 sailors thought to be lost. As many as 700 ships were heaped together in the Pool of London, one ship was found 15 miles (24 km) inland. A ship torn from its moorings in the Helford River in Cornwall was blown for 200 miles (320 km) before grounding eight hours later on the Isle of Wight.

Back then, people blamed the “crying sins of the nation” and saw it as punishment by God. The government declared 19 January 1704 a day of fasting, saying that it “loudly calls for the deepest and most solemn humiliation of our people”. Apparently, it remained a topic of preachy […]

Scottish summers not doing anything they haven’t done for 800 years already

Gotta love a long unbroken proxy.

Scientists looked at 44 pines sites across the Scottish Highlands and used their tree rings to create a continuous temperature series for the last 810 years. Showing admirable restraint, they did not paste on adjusted thermometer records to create a hockey stick effect. Instead we can see that Scottish summers were just as warm in the 1300s, the 1280s and around 1500 as well.

The rate of warming is not unprecedented. The temperature is not unusual. But thermometers don’t tell the same story as the tree rings in the last 50 years. They both can’t be right. Either the tree rings are always unreliable thermometers or the thermometers are placed near ice cream trucks and adjusted up-the-kazoo?

Thanks to CO2Science:

Rydval et al. extended “the previously published Scottish dendroclimatic record (Hughes et al., 1984) by nearly 500 years,” in order to create an 810-year-long proxy over the period AD 1200-2010. The reconstruction was derived from a network of 44 Scots pine (Pinus Sylvestris) sites across the Scottish Highlands from both living and subfossil samples that correlated well with summer (July-August) temperatures.

In placing the most recent warming of the instrumental […]

History rewritten, Global Cooling from 1940 – 1970, an 83% consensus, 285 papers being “erased”

The Global Cooling Scare of the 1970s was real, there was a consensus, and it was all over the media. It flies in the face of the man-made warming campaign. After World War II there was a massive industrial escalation in the West. And just as coal fired power was going in everywhere, the world damnwell cooled by -0.3°C. It’s obvious that the modern Climate Witches don’t want people bringing this up.

Where’s that cooling gone? The modern NASA GISS dataset adjusted it away:

What happened to 40 years of cooling from WWII onewards?

That’s the magic of homogenisation.

In 2008, Peterson, Connolley, and Fleck published “The Myth of the 1970s Global Cooling Scientific Consensus” . The Myth paper “found” that from 1965 through 1979, there were only 7 cooling, 20 neutral, and 44 warming papers. It was published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (AMS), showing how pathetically weak the caliber of review is there. Kenneth Richard searched, found and documents 220 papers, not 7 in the same period. He estimates there are probably many more.

The Connolley there is none other than the William Connolly who abused Wikipedia’s editing rules — barred 2,000 other […]

Experts “surprised” to discover what skeptics have known for years: world has been warming for 200 years

For years, skeptical scientists have been pointing at data that showed the the world started warming somewhere from 1700 – 1820. This has been known from glaciers, sea level studies, ice cores, boreholes, ocean heat content estimates, and more proxies than any climate-nerd cares to name.

Finally, expert climate modelers are “surprised” to discover this:

“…their study had detected warming in the Arctic and tropical oceans from around the 1830s, just 80 years after the Industrial Revolution started in England. “It was an extraordinary finding,” she said. “It was one of those moments where science really surprised us. But the results were clear. The climate warming we are witnessing today started about 180 years ago.”

How many grant dollars did it take to figure out what skeptical scientists have been saying for years?

The correlation with global temperatures and actual numerical human emissions is abysmal, so now Abrams et al ignore the numbers and appear to suggest that “The Industrial Revolution” itself started the warming — as if the mere invention of the steam engine heated the world.

[Dr Abram] said the study attributed the gradual warming to an increase in greenhouse gas emissions linked […]

Solar activity was really at exceptional lows during the cold Maunder Minimum

Fig 3 (Part VI only) Sunspot drawing of by G.D. Cassini in 1671 (Oldenburg, 1671c).

What is surprising is just how much data we have on the Sun from 400 years ago.

For some aspects of solar activity we barely have a half a solar cycle. For example, on solar spectral changes: UV and Infrared light swing up and down through the solar cycle, but we only got a good grip on these important changes in the last ten years with the SORCE mission.

But on other aspects of solar activity there is much more long term data than I expected: 400 years ago quite a few people were carefully recording detailed drawings of sun spots (like Cassini in 1671, right). Others were reporting aurorae — up to 150 a year in parish records, newspaper reports, and scientific observations, which tells us something about the strength of the solar wind. There were also observations of the solar corona during eclipses at the time, which suggest the sun was less active as well.

Lately some (Zolotova et al) have said solar activity was not low during the cold Maunder Minimum period from 1645 – 1715. Usoskin and others have responded […]

How do we panic about warming during a maunder-type freeze?

Is this the way the Great Global Warming Scare fades out?

The UK newspapers are full of “Maunder Freeze Coming” as forecast by Ineson et al.[1] Rest assured, the solar-driven-cold is only a local effect, only 0.1C, and only a vague short 20 to 40 winters to come. The Sun, which has been ruled out as a major cause of global warming, is still not a cause of global warming — it’s just a minor technical issue called UV from a local star, which will be affecting an ocean current. Then the Big 6.6 degrees of heatstroke will land upon us.

Britain could be on the verge of a mini Ice Age as the Sun enters a cooler phase, the Met Office warned yesterday.

The last big chill was felt hundreds of years ago when Frost Fairs were held on the frozen River Thames.

However the Met Office said the new freeze will not be enough to cancel out the effects of global warming.

We’ve seen this all before, but not on this scale. If there was a volatility index — like a VIX for climate-PR — it would be setting records. The contradictions […]

Scientific American: black death and slavery cause the little ice age?

Looks like Scientific American has gone a bit “cosmic”: The Little Ice Age was apparently caused by black death, small pox, and slavery. The theory goes that there was a small spikey dip in CO2 levels in 1610, which was man-made. So hold your breath, that means a whole new era should start from then. This small dip of dubious causality, plus the correlation of oddly unclimatic things like slavery, seems to make the spike worthy of an impressive sciencey title, lo, a new era is born — The start of the Anthropocene.

Let’s not mention that temperatures started falling from 1400 AD. That’s 200 years before the CO2 spike down. Cause and effect are so passe in postmodern science.

Mass Deaths in Americas Start New CO2 Epoch

Scientific American:

The atmosphere recorded the mass death, slavery and war that followed 1492. The death by smallpox and warfare of an estimated 50 million native Americans—as well as the enslavement of Africans to work in the newly depopulated Americas—allowed forests to grow in former farmlands. By 1610, the growth of all those trees had sucked enough carbon dioxide out of the sky to cause a drop of at least […]

Sun controls half of the groundwater recharge rate in China for last 700 years

Could this be why climate models do rainfall with all the competence of tea-leaf-reading? Tiwari et al report that as much as 47% of the recharge rates of ground water in China are controlled by the sun. Apparently climate models miss the minor factor of the major cycles.

Try this radical idea on: imagine a world where climate models worked. Not only could the BoM warn people that there would be a drought coming, they could name the region, and the years.

Tiwari et al:

Here for the purpose of comparison of long term ground water recharge rates with long term solar activity, we used the 10-year average sunspot time series, for the period 1300 to 1905 AD, published by Solanki et al., [2004]. Also the additional average annual sunspot number time series (1700 to 2000 AD) is used from data source Solar Influences Data Analysis Centre. In addition to decadal data annual sunspot number data from 1700 to 2000 AD downloaded from Solar Influences Data Analysis Centre is used in the present study. The cross-correlation coefficient (+0.63) between the groundwater recharge rate time series and decadal sunspot number [Solanki et al., 2004] shows that there is statistically significant solar […]

The North Atlantic jet stream correlates with Solar output over a millennium

A new paper (Moffa-Sánchez et al) reports that they looked at layers of dead plankton in ocean mud (otherwise known as foraminifera in marine sediments) and have reconstructed the temperature and salinity of a couple of spots in the North Atlantic between 818AD – 1780 with data on δ18O and the Mg/Ca ratios. One immediate thought, an aside, is that if this technique works, there is no shortage of ocean mud, surely, and perhaps we could drill and analyze more mud for solar correlations in other places. (I hear foraminifera live in the Southern Hemisphere too). Perhaps no one is looking for the connection with the sun?

Moffa-Sánchez et al find the big climate shifts (the 100-year variations) correlate with total solar irradiance (TSI). See especially that orange line black line track in the d graph below. I stress, correlations don’t mean causation and the mechanism is mere speculation. But I find the graph intruiging. There are a lot of turning points, and in pure “curve fitting” type of analysis, this is a better curve fit than the one with CO2. (Find me a turning point that matches with carbon dioxide!) I suspect we’ll be referring back to this paper, […]

Ocean heat content around Indonesia shows Medieval Warm Period and 2C warmth in holocene

Rosenthal et al have put out quite a humdinger of a paper. They’ve reconstructed the temperature of the water flowing out of the Pacific to the Indian Ocean over the last 10,000 years and as deep as 900m. The Indonesian Throughflow is pretty significant in global ocean currents. There’s narrow routes for Pacific upper waters to squeeze through to the Indian Ocean through the Makassar and Lombok Straits, and via the Lifamatola Passage through the Banda Sea, and water comes in from both the North and South Pacific.

An important point in global ocean currents where the Pacific flows through to the Indian Ocean.

Points to note (assuming the study is right):

Temperatures started rising around 1700AD — long before our carbon emissions. That temperatures were much warmer (0.65C) in 1100AD than they were in 1950. 8,000 years ago water was 1.5 to 2 degrees warmer — isn’t that meant to be a global catastrophe? Apparently coral reefs, fish, and turtles survived.

 

Figure 4. Holocene changes in Pacific Ocean heat content. (A) Reconstructed anomalies in Pacific OHC in the 0- to 700-m depth interval for the early Holocene, mid-Holocene, MWP, and LIA periods. Reconstructed anomalies are calculated […]

Melting glacier in Alaska reveals ancient remains of forest – evidence of warm periods

Glaciers that tore trees in half and then froze the stumps are receding again in Alaska to reveal those old remnants of a warmer era. I like these little “concrete” anecdotes, though their true meaning depends on exactly how old these remains are, and whether that timing correlates with warming in other places.

Ancient trees emerge from frozen forest ‘tomb’ Retreat of the Mendenhall Glacier reveals the remains of trees which grew more than 2,000 years ago By MARY CATHARINE MARTIN JUNEAU EMPIRE

The Mendenhall Glacier’s recession is unveiling the remains of ancient forests that have remained frozen beneath the ice for up to 2,350 years.

….

 

The most recent stumps she’s dated emerging from the Mendenhall are between 1,400 and 1,200 years old. The oldest she’s tested are around 2,350 years old. She’s also dated some at around 1,870 to 2,000 years old.

8.9 out of 10 based on 97 ratings […]

Fourier Analysis reveals six natural cycles driving temperatures, no man-made effect: predicts cooling

Thermometer circa 1790

UPDATED: Post note below, with a couple of extra caveats…

Lüdecke, Hempelmann, and Weiss found that the temperature variation can be explained with six superimposed natural cycles. With only six cycles they can closely recreate the 240 year central European thermometer record. There is little “non-cyclical” signal left, suggesting that CO2 might have a minor or insignificant effect.

The three German scientists used Fourier analysis to pick out the dominant cycles of one of the longest temperature records we have. The Central European temperature is an average of records from Prague, Vienna, Hohenpeissenberg, Kremsmünster, Paris, and Munich.

The dominant cycle appears to be about 250 years. There is also a cycle of about 60 years, corresponding to the Atlantic/Pacific decadal oscillations.

Data is of course, always the biggest problem. If we had 10,000 years of high quality global records, we could solve “the climate” within months. Instead, we have short records, and Lüdecke et al, make the most of what we have. The European records are only 240 years long, or (darn) one dominant cycle, and only one region, so to check that the results are valid over longer periods they also analyze a the 2000 […]

The message from boreholes

There have been suggestions that Jo Nova might be trying to hide or ignore the most recent boreholes graph from Huang et al. So here it is. This is the last 2,000 years according to 6000 boreholes, with the last 100 years also using the “instrumental record” which gives us that hockey-stick uptick at the end. Below I explain the pros and cons of this study and update my thoughts.

Huang and Pollack 2008: Their latest boreholes published study

 

A borehole sounds like a bit-of-a-stretch as a proxy. How could we tell if the world was warmer in 1066 by drilling a hole in the ground? Yes, fair point. But what makes boreholes useful is that they are global and there is a lot of data: specifically 6,000 holes all over the world.

I’ve been looking at boreholes in more detail, analyzing them in the light of newer proxies. When all the evidence is considered, boreholes turn out be not-much-use at giving us meaningful numbers in degrees C, and in my opinion, not-too-hot at telling us the “when” of an event either. Too much depends on assumptions.

But what are they good for is that, when combined with […]

Medieval Warm Period found in 120 proxies. Plus Roman era was similar to early 20th Century.

Two major proxy studies, larger than ever, were released in April and June 2012. They show that the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) existed, and was similar to current temperatures. These comprehensive studies suggest current temperatures are not unusual, and that itself is not all that surprising — I’ve mentioned before how there are hundreds of proxy studies showing it was as warm or warmer back then. (CO2science has been documenting them.) But these studies are worth a mention because they are so large.

Climate models cannot explain what caused the warming 1000 years ago, nor the cooling 300 years ago, so they can’t rule out the same factors aren’t changing the climate today (though they claim they can). If climate models can’t explain the past, they can’t predict the future.

The last 12 Centuries

Ljungqvist used 120 proxy records — nearly 3 times as many proxies as previous studies and conclude: “during the 9th to 11th centuries there was widespread NH warmth comparable in both geographic extent and level to that of the 20th century”. Their proxies included ice-cores, pollen, marine sediments, lake sediments, tree-rings, speleothems and historical documentary data.

Ljungqvistet al 2012 Fig. 4. Mean time-series of centennial […]

Chinese 2,485 year tree ring study shows natural cycles control climate, temps may cool til 2068

A blockbuster Chinese study of Tibetan tree rings by Liu et al 2011 shows, with detail, that the modern era is a dog-standard normal climate when compared to the last 2,500 years. The temperature, the rate of change — it’s all been seen before. Nothing about the current period is “abnormal”, indeed the current warming period in Tibet can be produced through calculation of cycles. Liu et al do a Fourier analysis on the underlying cycles and do brave predictions as well.

In Tibet, it was about the same temperature on at least four occasions — back in late Roman times (those chariots!), then again in the dark ages (blame the collapse of industry), then in the middle ages (the Vikings?), then in modern times (blame the rise of industry).

Clearly, these climate cycles have nothing to with human civilization. Their team finds natural cycles of many different lengths are at work: 2-3 years, 100 years, 199 years, 800 years, and 1,324 years. The cold periods are associated with sunspot cycles. What we are not used to seeing are brave scientists willing to publish exact predictions of future temperatures for 100 years that include rises and falls. Apparently, it will […]