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 and spatially synchronized cooling”.
Indeed, the researchers declare that volcanoes and solar variability appear to be the main drivers of the climate in SouthWestern Europe.
So finally we see one long continuous proxy record from ancient Greek times right through until 2010. The big question is why these sorts of studies are not done everywhere and all the time. It’s not like we don’t have plenty of caves with stalagmites to analyze. If the climate really was “the biggest threat to life on Earth” why are these extraordinary datasets not the top item on the wish-list of every institution that claims they care about the climate?
There will be more to say on this remarkable paper:
Click to enlarge. Oxygen isotopes are used to estimate temperatures.
Some passages from the paper discuss how these results match other studies from Europe:
The cold event at ca. 540 AD (the coldest of the speleothem record) may be related to a cataclysmic volcanic eruption that took place in Iceland in 536 AD and spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere, together with the effect of two other massive eruptions in 540 and 547 AD (Sigl et al., 2015). An unprecedented, long-lasting and spatially synchronized cooling was observed in European tree-ring records associated with these large volcanic eruptions, corresponding to the LALIA period (Büntgen et al., 2016).
Some passages from the paper discuss how these results compare with many other studies from Europe and with stark moments in history.
5.2.2. Temperature variability in W Europe and the W Mediterranean during last 2500 years
There are very few high-resolution speleothem records in Europe covering the CE (Comas-Bru et al., 2020). We compare the Central Pyrenean speleothem composite with nine selected speleothems records in Europe and northern Africa which cover with robust chronology and decadal resolution the last 2500 years (Fig. 5). One of these records is interpreted as NAO variability (Baker et al., 2015), three are paleo-precipitation reconstructions (Ait Brahim et al., 2019; Cisneros et al., 2021; Thatcher et al., 2022) and the other five are reflecting paleo-temperature variations (Affolter et al., 2019; Fohlmeister et al., 2012; Mangini et al., 2005; Martín-Chivelet et al., 2011; Sundqvist et al., 2010). Considering these differences in the interpretation and the fact these records are from different regions with different climates (from Sweden to Morocco), dissimilar profiles of paleoclimate variability can be expected. Still, some features are comparable and can be discussed to obtain a super-regional picture.
A. The Roman period in Europe-W Mediterranean. In Europe, and particularly in the Mediterranean region, the RP is well-known as a warm period (e.g., McCormick et al., 2012). The average sea-surface temperature in the western Mediterranean Sea was 2°C higher than the average temperature of the late centuries (Margaritelli et al., 2020). Our composite, with high values of normalized 18O values during the whole RP, and particularly from 0-200 AD, agrees with the scenario of warm temperatures (Fig. 5i). Speleothem data from the Balearic Islands (Cisneros et al., 2021) indicate a transition from humid to dry conditions along the Iberian-RP (Fig. 5c). The dry period at the end of the RP in the Balearic record, appears in agreement with a new speleothem record from northern Italy (Hu et al., 2022), suggesting that the observed drying trend was a possible contribution to the collapse of the Roman Empire in 476 AD. Record from Morocco (Ait Brahim et al., 2019), contrarily, marks a humid trend at the end of the RP (Fig. 5d). Similarly, an increase in humidity was observed in southern Iberia during the Iberian-Roman Period (Jiménez-Moreno et al., 2013; Martín-Puertas et al., 2009) thus reflecting a large spatial heterogeneity in precipitation during the RP when comparing records from the north and south of the Mediterranean basin.
REFERENCES
Bartolomé, M., Moreno, A., Sancho, C., Cacho, I., Stoll, H., Haghipour, N., Belmonte, Á., Spötl, C., Hellstrom, J., Edwards, R. L., and Cheng, H.: Reconstructing land temperature changes of the past 2,500 years using speleothems from Pyrenean caves (NE Spain), Clim. Past Discuss. [preprint], https://doi.org/10.5194/cp-2023-54, in review, 2023.
Great article. The evidence is overwhelming.
Obviously, the Romans could have combated the warming if they’d had windmills, solar cells and electric chariots 😉
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Who would have thought that our planet slowly moving away from the Sun would make our planet colder?
Simple mathematics has totally been tossed into the trash…
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Heh Heh, I’m loving the concept of the electric chariot. I’m reimagining the classic scene from Ben Hur, seeing Charlton Heston riding a large ornate segue like chariot and clashing with other riders, their engines quietly humming all the while. And then the endless line of plebs coming out with pails of water to douse a chariot when it’s lithium battery catches on fire
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Obviously it is western civilisation that causes climate change the science is in
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I’ll wait for the peer review
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..gotta pick the right peers. Soon they’ll be fact-checking peers and issuing lists of who you are allowed to use because they support the narrative. Some sub-educated young inexperienced Masters degree in BIPOC geology.
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Crick and Watson’s paper on the structure of DNA wasn’t peer reviewed before publication.
Most of Einstein’s work was also not peer reviewed before publication.
In fact, a vast array of ground-breaking papers were not peer reviewed before publication, yet they managed to contribute to the sum total of human knowledge and understanding.
Why do you still believe it’s useful to get your mates to tick a box before publication?
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Einstein had contempt for the peer review process.
One of, if not the only time peer review was attempted on his papers was the joint paper with Rosen on gravitational waves which they submitted to Physical Review in 1935.
Einstein wrote:
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I suppose the usual venal scientist/activist mob will come out and say “but they’re not climate scientists”. Not to worry, Mann and Rahmstorrf will push for a retraction if it gets much further. Compelling science in the article.
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Peter, you mean “peers” like pimply-faced, green-haired, 22 year old socialist media “fact checkers” and anti-scientists whose “expertise” is in nonsense subjects like “critical race theory”, “feminist studies”, “intersectionality”, “queer theory” etc.?
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Peer review…..hmmm.
It has about as much credibility as computer modelling.
Self inflicted of course. They have destroyed their credibility.
Zealotry and bias has a habit of doing that.
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1. consensus doesn’t establish truth.
2. appeal to authority is the weakest of all possible arguments.
3. you can’t appeal to authority if there is no consensus (as here).
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ok. And then what?
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‘ … peer review …’
Its all about the veracity of the data, stalagmites and stalactites are good.
In the Australian Alps they have discovered the RWP through a different process.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-22766-z
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The scientific method’s peer review vs Jo’s review ??
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The scientific method, and modern day peer review are completely unrelated.
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Peer Review? Perhaps they could get the same mob that peer reviewed Mann’s ‘hockey stick’ paper … you know, the one that has been totally debunked?
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Peter,
That is why you are not up to date on the topic.
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Even if the world was warming, I always ask warmists what’s wrong with that and they can never provide a satisfactory, or any, answer.
During naturally warm periods such as the Minoan, Egyptian, Roman and Medieval warm periods, civilisation has thrived.
During naturally cool periods such as the Little Ice Age, there has been famine, warm and disease.
Humans, and nearly all other species love warmth! Just look at how much people from cold climates pay to go on vacations in warm climates!
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The RWP was two degrees warmer than today and for 600 years the planet suffered no ill effects, but in return the zealots say its the speed of this change now taking place which is of concern.
Presumably the RWP on steroids.
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When I pointed out to my alarmist relatives in Sydney that if they want to experience what a catastrophic temperature increase of 1.5 degrees increase is like they could just move from Sydney to Brisbane, they stared blankly as if this could not possibly be true.
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Warmists are trying to terraform the planet (a hereto science fiction concept with term coined by Jack Williamson in 1942) to make it colder.
However, it’s not OK for mankind to supposedly make it warmer due to combustion of carboniferous fuels, which of course isn’t happening anyway as the anthropogenic contribution to all atmospheric CO2 is only about 4% and it is rapidly sunk by natural processes.
In fact, it is very likely the world will soon enter a cooling phase, if it hasn’t already. It will be difficult for humsnity to to survive since we are shutting down all the power stations, especially in the more fanatical followers of the anthropogenic global warming fraud like Australia.
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To put a finer point on it, CO2 is 0.042% of the atmosphere. Of that, 96% is natural occurrence, of which AU is 0.0132 of it. And, the cultists claim the solution is to achieve 350 ppm or 0.0350% CO2. So the target is to reduce atmospheric CO2 by 70 ppm or 0.007 %.
So the argument is that if AU reduces its 1.3% of CO2 emissions, then the 0.013 x 0.007 x 0.04 % = 0.00000364 % of atmospheric CO2, then the world will be safe from global warming.
Might anyone. Anyone, Anywhere. Prove how 0.0000000364 parts of anything control the world climate? Seriously. That is 0.0363 parts per million.
If AU went back to 1850 civilization conditions, it would make Zero impact upon present reality, now, or 100 yrs from now.
Is anyone in AU smart enough to see that? AU is irrelevant to any CO2 emission scheme. Anything AU does to reduce CO2 is irrelevant.
If AU is willing to destroy their civilization for Zero impact, then the insane control the nuthouse.
If AU citizens allow this travesty, then they deserve what they have allowed.
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It’s not about ‘relevancy’, it’s about ideology, politicking, virtue-signalling, the transfer of billions to companies in other countries, the destruction of our energy independence. It’s about the impoverishment of the West to suit the WEF/UN/China cabal.
We didn’t vote for this, but Blackout Bowen has given it to us anyway. Why anyone would vote for these lunatics is beyond me – they are re-runs from the failed Rudd-Gillard-Rudd days.
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Once more; with “feeling”:
“Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
– Maurice Strong; Founder of the UN Environment Programme (UNEP)
“The task before UNESCO is to help the emergence of a single world culture, with its own philosophy and background of ideas, and with its own broad purposes.” – ” – Julian Huxley -founder of UNESCO and the much of the modern environmental movement
This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time, to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the Industrial Revolution. – Christiana Figueres, Executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule. – – H. L. Mencken
“To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have. Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.” – Dr Stephen Schneider; Dr. Stephen Schneider, Greenhouse Superstar / Leading greenhouse advocate, in an interview for “Discover” magazine, Oct 1989.
Eco-Fascism is a DEATH CULT.
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This changes nothing. Climate alarmism is a faith, no matter what contrary evidence is provided they will happily follow their faith anyway.
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Jo – How about adding in the work of Shaviv and Svensmark for comparison, as they have done a lot of study on Stalagmites in caves which should back this up; they concentrated on Cosmic Rays, but the combination should be very interesting.
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No Name Man, indeed this paper itself looks at solar activity (not in the kind of detail Shaviv and Svensmark do) and I plan to look at that in more detail in a separate post.
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Thanks jo – noted and look forward to it
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The world’s oceans have fallen a minimum of 4.2 metres over the last seven thousands years; that’s geological Fact.
All of the water removed from the seas is now locked up as ice and no significant sea level changes have occurred in the last one hundred years.
Why is there any debate about the “dangers” of oceans rising to flood the world.
It’s just Manipulation.
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Now that a Norwegian cruise ship has ‘run aground’ in/on Greenland, all that frozen water will fall into the sea and we’ll be roooooon’d – Science!
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Maybe it was just an unusually low tide, not global cooling?
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So the 21st century Viking is one who Rams and Pollutes rather than Rapes and Pillages.
Got it.
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And Erik the Red founded Greenland by first giving it an appealing name to attract people and also as a result of him exploring the area during his exile but also because due to the Medieval Warm Period it was somewhat warm there. It supported up to 5000 people until the conditions became unfavourable to non-Eskimos due to the Little Ice Age.
Warmists think the climate is static, “always has been, always will be” but there have been numerous climactic variations throughout recorded history.
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And the rains have returned to Libya… and Greece and…
NIWA have discovered Spring arrives in September, so, according to their expensive ‘super’ computer models, NZ will be warmer and drier in December. Que? It’s called Dummer – oops spalchick pier rev you – Summer!
Apparently Australia is in for some ‘warmer and drier climate’ too… Models!
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You would “like” the climate to “feel” warm wouldn’t you ? Not have to worry about that extreme right wing cold ? We should play their game….
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Climate modelers are the true deniers of climate change. Their models embody an impossible equilibrium state usually in 1850. There is a presumption that Earth’s climate was in perfect harmony before humans started burning fossil fuels in ever increasing quantities about 200 years ago.
In fact, Earth’s climate has never been stable and never will be stable. The current temperature trends being observed are consistent with the changing solar intensity across the globe under the influence of the constantly changing orbit:
https://1drv.ms/b/s!Aq1iAj8Yo7jNhlHN4A_kDcuvdIjE?e=hyAU9v
A key failing of climate models is their inability to resolve convective instability and the physical process of cloud formation that is tightly linked to surface temperature. The models will never be useful until they can effectively simulate convective instability. Parameterising clouds is junk science.
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The problem with the climate models is that they are based on an algorithm that can predict the climate in 100 years, but fails to confirm all past climate numbers. Which is why global weather organisations are ‘homogenizing’ the temps to fit the narrative. And they’ve been caught at it – but the media still maintains the ‘nothing to see here’ narrative.
Eventually, physical temperatures are going to have a much greater margin than the printed temperature. “Ten degrees by your outdoor weather station? Well, that can’t be right. The BOM says it’s 20 degrees where you are!!”
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Don’t tell Michael Mann about the RWP – he’ll no doubt try to magically erase it.
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Fortunately Mann’s fake graph only goes back to the year 1000.
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Thanks again to Jo Nova for highlighting the much warmer Roman period and the number of new studies.
But the co2 Science site has hundreds of studies about the Science of the much warmer early Holocene and Eemian inter- glacial periods.
Of course the early Holocene Optimum was much warmer than today and warmer than the Minoan and Roman warm periods as well.
Even their ABC tells us that SLs at Sydney area were 1.5 metres higher than today just 4,000 years ago.
Ken Stewart has also linked to many studies that show these much higher SLs along our east coast etc.
Here’s the Idso’s site and they cover all the different warm periods and SLs etc over a very long period of time.
There’s a button to click on that allows you to search alphabetically for studies about past Climate Change.
BTW Craig Idso is also a member of the Co2 Coalition group of Scientists.
http://co2science.org/
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Here’s the Subject Index page to easily search the Co2 Science site.
http://co2science.org/subject/subject.php
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Correct Neville. Studies of lake sediments in Sweden and Latvia infer that the Holocene Climatic Optimum, between 8000 to 4000 BP, were at its max 2 degrees above the RWP.
Of course the alarmists say the HCO wasn’t global. Yet, as you point out, sea level studies throughout SE Asia, Australia and the Pacific of geomorphic features and in situ fossils show that sea levels were between 1-2+ meters higher than today.
Post-glacial sea-level changes around the Australian
margin: a review
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Note that as with most Goolag searches you get results specifically and dishonestly biased to suit the Official Narrative so it makes it harder to find critical analyses of Michael Mann’s infamous “Hockey Stick” graph in which he erased the Medieval Warm Period.
And if you do a Goolag search for “hockey stick graph debunked” the first result you get is a fake Reuters “fact check” saying the Hockey Stick is not false.
I thought even some warmists now knew it was garbage.
I didn’t realise warmists still believed in that piece of climate propaganda masquerading as scholarship.
I guess the lie of the Hockey Stick has now been repeated often enough that it has now become “truth”, at least truth according to post-modernists who don’t believe in objective truth but “their truth”.
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David the trouble is that a number of their so called Scientists just promote their own propaganda and hide the real historic Scientific data and proper research.
But there are thousands of real scientists who always follow real Data and evidence.
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There ought to be caves with stalactites in many areas with limestone and a reasonable rainfall so, as Jo wrote, it should not be too difficult to gather data from other areas and discover whether or not it confirms the conclusions from the study mentioned in this article.
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The Roman Warm Period is well documented, however, communicating this information to the masses is alarmingly slow.
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There’s big limestone cave systems all over Australia- Jenolan Caves (NSW), Buchan (Vic) and Naracoorte (South Australia), to name just a few. BUT, no scientist is going to get funding if there’s a chance to corroborate these findings, which basically indicate that along with other previous warm periods there was also the Roman Warm Period. Which indicates that warming periods are nothing new and also no correlation with CO2 levels. They would be disproving the religion of man-made climate change and join the Peter Ridd club. Forever banished and ostracised.
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Next time I’m trying to convince someone there is no climate emergency …
I’ll tell them …
But, but … dissimilar profiles of paleoclimate variability can be expected. Still, some features are comparable and can be discussed to obtain a super-regional picture …
and … reflecting a large spatial heterogeneity in precipitation during the RP when comparing records from the north and south of the Mediterranean basin shows the oceans are not boiling.
Should work.
‘Spatial heterogeneity’ … slays ’em every time.
I think maybe we should prepare to scavenge for food.
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AGAIN here’s Andrew Bolt’s 2019 interview with Hydrographic surveyor Daniel Fitzhenry comparing the BOM Sydney Fort Denison SL Rise since 1914.
Very little change over that long period of time and Fitzhenry says the data is very accurate and goes up and down over many years.
This only takes a few minutes to watch and you’ll probably learn something.
But certainly no dangerous SL Rise since 1914 or dangerous Climate Change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mjOmsqIibk
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The Fort Denison BOM SL data has been updated to July 2023.
See here for Mean SL from the BOM.
http://www.bom.gov.au/ntc/IDO70000/IDO70000_60370_SLD.shtml
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Here is NOAA’s chart for Fort Denison.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=680-140
And sealevel.info’s chart
http://www.sealevel.info/MSL_graph1.php?id=Sydney&boxcar=1&boxwidth=2&thick&datasource=psmsl
I discovered NOAA’s very interesting tidesandcurrents site shortly after David Evans(a bloke with a Welsh name) was cited in MSM by (I forget) a bloke with an Irish name to debunk AGW “science” in the early noughties. I then cited the NOAA chart as proof that the rate of sea level change, 0.65 mm/year, had not changed in over a century.
This must have got to NOAA, because in 2010 they stopped updating that chart. Just terminated it.
Over the next ten years I saw a couple of suspicious fiddles to that chart, which were dropped. One was a freehand looking disconnected squiggle showing a sharp rise. Another a connected line showing a sharp rise which reverted to the trend line in the final year.
Eventually they settled on the chart shown here showing a rise at an increasing rate, at first rising from 0.65 mm/yr to 0.75 mm/yr, and now, I see. 0.8 mm/yr, while another chart shows more than 1mm/yr.
All looks suspicious to me.
I haven’t checked their uptick to see if it is consistent with their numbers.
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There are few datasets such as this collected or available because we’re not dealing with a science. We are dealing with a cult requiring obeisance of its disciples and the whole edifice cloaked in mysticism
We are dealing with a power and money grab and the tool of the activists’ choice is fear. Openly available data and detailed critical analysis (the pursuit of knowledge through the scientific method) would simply make it more difficult to deliver a consistent and coherent (if entirely stupid) message.
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I’d question the enthusiasm here. Plenty of us laugh at the ridiculous idea of using trees as thermometers. Is the idea of using stalagmites as thermometers all *that much* more convincing? Reading about it today, the idea is that (like with ice cores), you measure the proportions of different oxygen isotopes and (I guess on the grounds of ever reliable “common sense”…) a greater presence of the heavier isotope must mean a higher temperature outside in order to lift the heavier water molecules.
Has there been any side-by-side testing of this theory: temperature readings over ten years (say), then take a core from the stalagmite and see? Without such a study, how does anyone know it’s a temperature proxy and not just a rainfall proxy. Or are those the same thing, after all a hotter world is a
wetterdrierwetterer… hotter world.42
See Jouzel et al 1994 and Figure 3a. “For the present day climate the correlation between observed annual precipitation site temperature T …. and 18O is strong enough to produce the linear relationship indicated in the scatterplot in Figure 3a. (Each point in the plot corresponds to a single measurement site….)
Figure 3. Annual 18O in precipitation (in per mil) versus the annual temperature in degrees Celsius at the precipitation site, for (a) present day observations…
Jouzel, J., R.D. Koster, R.J. Suozzo, and G.L. Russell, 1994: Stable water isotope behavior during the last glacial maximum: A general circulation model analysis. J. Geophys. Res., 99, 25791-25801, doi:10.1029/94JD01819.
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Thanks Joanne, that plot is very striking.
Just to clarify, the plot doesn’t seem to be *in* the subject paper. When I Google for Stable water isotope behaviour during the last glacial maximum, there’s a paywall, but the abstract talks about applying GCM simulations. A simulation? Wouldn’t be the first time climatologists used circular reasoning as “proof”.
In any case, what is that striking relationship actually saying? I’m not too sure, but a temperature of -20K strikes me as science fiction.
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I just got home: looked up my favourite blog and find a graph like something out of the pier review system.
There’s no such temperature as minus 60 K.
Indeed the lowest conceptual temperature of 0 K has never been reached, even in deep space it’s at least one degree above absolute zero.
Theoretical absolute zero is about minus 273.16 °C or 0 K and it has never been reached.
21
is not correct.
It has never been measured by humans.
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Is there really somewhere in the universe where all matter and energy are completely and irretrievably absent?
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Absolute zero can NEVER be reached as to do so would require an infinite amount of work and an infinite amount of time.
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Yes, in one sense it’s a bit like the big bang concept: all the signs point backwards but it’s just a help to picture what might have happened.
With absolute zero it’s the theoretical end and absence of all energy and matter.
Such a situation doesn’t exist.
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But Robert, I gave you the full paper? If you could only find the abstract instead, you haven’t seen the paper. Why would you assume the graph I said was there isn’t there? The link I supplied is to a NASA page. Underneath the Jouzel description it has a link “Get PDF” which I used to get the full paper and the graph.
The graph is on page 25,797 of the link I supplied. It’s in the paper. I’m sorry, it’s getting a bit extreme when I go to the trouble to supply the paper, the graph, the caption, and people still can’t find it. I made sure I read the caption carefully “present day observations”. Fig 3b and 3c are the simulations, not 3a.
Keith — Slow down and read the caption, which I bothered to type by hand and wrote above. It says “in degrees Celsius”..
So I don’t know (and don’t care much) that the y axis is labelled K, but lets assume a stupid typo happened rather than throwing out the entire experiment and all the data instead, OK?
We fight the forces of darkness. Lets keep our eye on the balls that matter and not the trivia. I’m pretty sure NASA knows about absolute zero.
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Thanks Jo.
“Keith — Slow down”.
I believe that the graph was from the document authors and so a criticism of their science and care for detail.
00
Thanks Joanne. I did try the link, and tried again just now on your “NASA page” and “Get PDF” links. You and Gee Aye had no bother, but my browser just times out after a while. Tried from outside my firewall today. Something still blocks access. That was why the Google search. Sorry for not mentioning this yesterday.
The “Temperature (K)” leapt out at me (apparently not to the reviewers), but ignoring the label and using the caption instead, I’m perplexed what an “annual temperature” might be. A mean of some sort over the whole year I presume. Does that make sense to you? The temperature that matters is the temperature when the rain/snow was forming. Sydney tends to have wet summers, Melbourne: wet winters. The annual mean temperatures might be quite similar, but the Oxygen 18 content should be higher in warm Sydney rain.
And even allowing that the oxygen isotope test works as per this plot, and the rain really does conveniently summarise the year’s temperatures for us, that only gets us to the surface. Is the path for the rain/snow from there to dripping in a cave to leaving lime deposits with just the same isotope proportions (in the water of crystallisation I presume) all that reliable?
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Robert, I’ll email you a copy of the paper. Cave stalagmites form very slowly, as you know, so they are a very smoothed average that depends on the location and rate of formation. Obviously some layers of the stalagmite have higher and lower levels of 18-O, so for some reason, some years have more and some less. How did that arise? Not so coincidentally, we find that the years with ratios that suggest the temperature was higher also match tree ring growth, documentary history, recent thermometer measurements, coral shell changes, pollen deposition, tree lines, sea level changes, ice core bubbles, diatom istopes on the sea floor, lake sediments, fossil remnants etc.
The ice core scientists have been using 18-O for years and it seems the biggest problem to me is that if the climate systems shift that precipitation some years over the ice cores may be from a different part of the ocean.
However, we do see similar patterns in different parts of Antarctica, so the picture appears to be coherent more than not. What seems far mroe dubious to me than temp measurements from ice cores are the CO2 measurements, which are “smoothed” by 60 – 5,000 years depending on the rate of snow accumulation. I suspect the chemistry of ice cores is so extreme there is a rate limiting step and a maximal cut off for CO2, but I was unable to prove that this is definitely the case when I wrote the book chapter on ice cores for the Climate Change: The Facts book.
00
Jo, Many thanks for sending the paper. I have read through it a few times while making notes, and feel I now have a reasonable understanding of it.
My scepticism on this point is along the lines of Douglas Adams’s babel fish (“it is such a bizarrely improbable coincidence that anything so mind-bogglingly useful could evolve purely by chance”): we are currently (weirdly) obsessed with mean temperatures and, lo and behold, here’s something we can measure, one simple number, which lets us time-travel and read the mean temperatures from centuries ago. Bizarrely improbable.
Ok, on to the paper. I’ll not worry about its central theme since that’s mostly about using simulations to validate simulations. Circular, as I suspected.
I accept that the fractional distillation of different oxygen isotopes from water at phase changes is a real effect. I suspect that it applies more strongly to the melt/freeze phase than to the evaporate/condense one, but that’s only a hunch, and I don’t suppose it affects things all that much. (I did try to get the previous paper — Jouzal et al, 1987 — but the NASA blockage meant I could only get the abstract again)
Obviously you can’t treat a raindrop as a literal thermometer. It is historical; it can only tell you something about the temperature when it evaporated and when it condensed. And a single drop may be an outlier, so you need to accumulate more rain, mix it up, and test that. This has the effect of averaging the histories of all the raindrops and will be related to the average of the temperatures they experienced as they formed.
That’s handy, and Jouzal et al have had a red hot go at nailing down the relationship. They have presented a formula to turn proportion of oxygen 18 into long-term mean temperature. My first quibble would be that you can’t nail down just *how* long-term that mean is. (As an aside, I find the graphs on p25,795 rather grotesque: we “know” mean temperature over a multi-year span, so let’s assume we can nail it down on a monthly basis).
So far, so good. It all accords with a nice basic physics understanding of the world. Problem is that it washes up on Judith Curry’s complexity monster. The authors acknowledge a problem with Greenland, and with the tropics; they basically arm-wave these away. They also say their formula may have had different coefficients in the past. Hmmm. Doesn’t sound so basic physics anymore.
I suggest that the proportion of oxygen 18 is a number that reflects many factors. Two factors will indeed be the ambient temperature where that drop evaporated/sublimed and the ambient temperature where it condensed/froze. Other factors like wind, humidity, insolation are in there for sure. There are probably many others.
Those are my reservations as far as testing a beaker-full of fresh rain or snow. I don’t have many extra reservations as far as ice cores go, but when we get into ground aquifers, stalagmites, etc., the complexity monster steps in again. I very seriously doubt that even two stalagmites in the one cave will have the same isotope profiles. Maybe we need to average the readings from multiple stalagmites (because the whole climate caper is built on averaging: blurring the picture, then warning abount monsters lurking in the blur).
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Robert, the paper goes to great lengths to explain their calibration. In fact that is the bulk of the paper. Do you have a specific refutation of the method?
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Gee Aye,
Tempted to invoke Johnson’s spirit and refute it thus (with a kick).
I don’t refute it, but neither do I accept it. See response to Jo above.
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My version to refute their silly dangerous CC or even their Human EXISTENTIAL THREAT lunacy is to just refer to Human flourishing since 1900 or 1950 or 1970 or 2000.
Human pop in 1950 was about 2.5 billion and global life exp about 46 years.
Today our pop is over 8 billion and life exp about 73 years.
Of course the percentage of farmers needed today is very low as more Humans move to Urban living and yet most people enjoy more food intake today and very low numbers suffer from hunger.
Most children are literate today and child mortality numbers are at record lows.
Just check the proper data from OWI Data etc and also check the huge drop of 95%+ of people who die from extreme weather events today. Just check the data.
So when will we WAKE UP?
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I recall PJ O’Rouke’s rebuke to the end fossil fuel folks back in the 80s
would you rather die of cancer at age 80 or typhus at age 9?
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Notice how there seems to be a buffer?
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Reminds me of this paper Persistent warm Mediterranean surface waters during the Roman period which supports the conclusions above.
but it is also good to remember this quote from this paper “No evidence for globally coherent warm and cold periods over the pre-industrial Common Era” (and yes Jo has a bunch of posts claiming Neukom’s papers are wrong – look them up and say hi to me)
[A valiant effort. – LVA]
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BS. That proves absolutely nothing. It might appeal to the navel gazing statistically and mathematically ignorant class of people who think emotions superior to actual science, but it proves nothing, GA.
Salutations to your faith in ignorance, politics, power, and emotion. It is rare to observe the faithful in their ritual denial of fact and science.
So tell us all. By your models predictions in hindcast for which all data is known.
What was the temperature in USA Oklahoma in 1936? Take as much time as you need.
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Oklahoma, is that the place where wind comes right behind the rain?
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Avert your eyes Gee Aye, yet again, for the 20th time — the global nature of the warming is shown via 6,000 boreholes drilled all over the world, or 57 ocean sediment cores spread through the Atlantic and Pacific, or hundreds of proxy studies.
See the Medieval Warm Period tag.
One of those posts was done in Feb 2010, and Gee Aye still doesn’t have an answer…
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On the way to hopium springing eternal then?
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Hi Lance. I can see why no one asks you to review scientific papers.
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Gee Aye, the quote you used contained nothing but their opinions. How many proxies did they consider? What kind of proxies, which locations. etc. Do you even know?
With 5 seconds of scrolling I see Figure 1b in Neukom suggests they have very few records during the MWP and RP and apparently it’s mostly tree ring analysis with a couple of glacier and lake sediments. The temperature of the whole of Australia 1,000 years ago is measured by a few trees in Tasmania. There is no data at all from “The Pacific Ocean” except for corals that only applies to the last 300 years. Same for the Atlantic.
I mean — apparently Neukom et al had work to ignore 50 years of proxy data to cherry pick the only ones that suited their agenda. After doing so, they didn’t find lots of proxies of cold during the MWP or Roman times, the best they could do was :
“97% of the years prior to 1850 had at least 10% of the globe experiencing above average temperatures and 10% of the globe experiencing below average temperatures.” Which is a big “so what”?
Neukom published in 2019, but the boreholes, ocean sediment cores, cave data, ice cores, have all been known for 15-30 years and it’s like they don’t exist.
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The Two Thousand Year time frame is interesting, and prompts the question;
“Where did the water go?”
No doubt you ask, what water, because really, ignorance is bliss.
It has been known by geologists for at least sixty years that in that time span since the time of Jesus the oceans have fallen 1.2 metres. Unequivocal.
O.K. question, where is that water?
Yes, it’s locked up somewhere as ICE.
Why is it still locked up. Shirley with wobal glorming it would have come back.
“
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Fascinating Keith and so relevant to using oxygen isotopes as a proxy for temperature.
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Just pointing to the possibility that there’s more than one way to skin a cat.
🙂
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Mr. Aye: You brought up the “R” word (regional), did not see where you were discussing isotopes. But the sea level debunks your “regional” irrelevance, so I can see why you gotta change the subject.
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The regional argument doesn’t stack up, but hemispheric differences are still on the cards.
Can you see a problem with this Graham Readfearn quote?
‘In an apparent effort to undermine the nature of global temperature rise, Mitchell wrote: “Evidence suggests temperatures were higher during the medieval warming and the Roman warming.”
‘Actually, evidence does not suggest this. The latest United Nations assessment of climate studies says the world is warmer now than at any time over at least the past 100,000 years.’ (Guardian)
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EG the problem is that some people will write just about any BS and FRAUD in The Guardian.
And so many of the so called Scientists will just turn a blind eye. Unbelievable but true.
Just look at the higher Holocene SL data over many thousands of years.
And previous Eemian SLs were much higher than the Holocene SLs.
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No need to convince me, I was hoping professor leaf might reply with an intelligent answer.
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AGAIN here’s the global DECADAL DEATHS from all Natural disasters per 100,000 people since 1900 and NOTE the huge drop since the 1950s.
AND NOTE that we have another 5.5 BILLION people at RISK today compared to 70+ years ago.
What is it that people or so called scientists CAN’T UNDERSTAND about these NUMBERS?
https://ourworldindata.org/explorers/natural-disasters?facet=none&country=~OWID_WRL&pickerSort=desc&pickerMetric=deaths_rate_per_100k_flood&Disaster+Type=All+disasters&Impact=Deaths&Timespan=Decadal+average&Per+capita=true
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Despite all attempts by the ecoloons to first erase them, then try and argue they were localized, those warm periods of history just don’t seem to be prepared to fade away. So inconvenient to the global warming narrative.
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AGAIN here’s the annual heat wave index for the USA since 1900.
So what caused that exceptional HEAT WAVE from about 1930 to 1937? And it started over 90 YEARS AGO?
And co2 levels then were about 308 ppm, so very low levels of co2.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/heat-wave-index-usa
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AGAIN why is the Human Development Index so high today? Here’s the index and the OWI Data SUMMARY.
Note Australia has a very high number today.
“Historical Index of Human Development, 1870 to 2015.”
“The Historical Index of Human Development (HIHD) is a summary measure of average achievement in three key dimensions of human development: a long and healthy life, being knowledgeable and having a decent standard of living.”
AGAIN compare the Index to 50 or 70 or 100 or more years ago.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/human-development-index-escosura?country=GBR~USA~KOR~IND~CHN~BRA~CPV~AUS~SWE~CHE~JPN
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Here’s OWI Data Child Mortality Rates since 1960 for wealthy countries and a shorter period for the World and for poorer countries.
AGAIN the Child mortality rates are much lower today.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/child-mortality-igme?tab=chart&country=BDI~GTM~KNA~AUS~OWID_EUR~South+Asia+%28UNICEF%29~CHE~GBR~USA~OWID_WRL~FRA~DEU~ISL~NLD~NZL~NOR~CAN~CHN
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If the climate really was “the biggest threat to life on Earth”…
We all know it’s not “The Climate”, but “The Climate Change Industrial Complex” that’s the biggest threat. They’re out to make heaps of $$$ and the Climate and the people be damned.
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In 1800 the majority of people had to work on farms, but today wealthy countries require very few farm workers.
The workers employed on the land have also dropped over the last 30 years and China has also seen a big drop.
Of course this just proves again that their so called dangerous climate change is just more BS and FRAUD.
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-of-the-labor-force-employed-in-agriculture?tab=chart&country=COL~CHN~JAM~ITA~POL~FRA~NLD~ETH~DEU~JPN~NZL~OWID_NAM~ZAF~SWE~CHE~GBR~OWID_WRL~AUS
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https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2006GL027662
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/222673311_Reconstruction_of_temperature_in_the_Central_Alps_during_the_past_2000_yr_from_a_18O_stalagmite_record
Nice papers bei Mangini and Vollenweider.
Mangini had, of course, some trouble with the well known Rahmstorf. 😀
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Only a quick look at the links so I need to ask, is O18 isotope a proxy for SST of the tropical North Atlantic? The temperature seem to have jumped up from 1850 to 1950 then a pause! A bit different to the HadSST NH.
https://www.woodfortrees.org/graph/hadsst3nh/plot/esrl-amo
The north eastern Atlantic has set records for warmest on record this year.
https://climate.copernicus.eu/sites/default/files/custom-uploads/Page%20Uploads/June%2023%20CB/fig2_plot_era5_monthly_anomalies_sst_neatlantic_june.png
of, course the records start a 44 years ago.
While June 2023 sticks out, this research suggests it’s still well below previous temperatures.
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From the paper:
2.3. Cave climate
Understanding the modern microclimatic and hydrological conditions of caves is import for a sound interpretation of speleothem proxy data (Genty et al., 2014; Lachniet, 2009; Moreno et al., 2014). Particularly, the transfer of the stable isotopic signal from the rainfall to the dripwater and, eventually, to the studied stalagmite is influenced by different processes in the atmosphere, soil and epikarst. Our preliminary results for the Pyrenees show a seasonal pattern of precipitation isotopes consistent with the annual temperature cycle (Moreno et al., 2021b). These data also suggest a temperature−18O relationship of 0.47‰/°C (Giménez et al., 2021) that is only partially compensated by the -0.18 ‰/°C due to the water calcite isotope fractionation (Tremaine et al., 2011) thus allowing to use 18O in speleothems as a temperature indicator in this region (see also Bartolomé et al., 2015a; Bernal-Wormull et al., 2021).
From the four studied caves, the best monitored one is Seso cave where a detailed monitoring survey was conducted including analyses of 18O variability in rainfall, soil water, dripwater and farmed calcite (Bartolomé, 2016). Seso cave developed under just few metres of rock, while the other caves are much deeper, allowing a faster response to rainfall variability in Seso dripwaters and speleothems. Monitoring carried out in Seso cave indicates a relationship between temperature and 18O of rainfall observed at seasonal scale and slightly modulated by the precipitation (Bartolomé et al., 2015a).
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The planet is COOLING.
It has been cooling since it coalesced from a huge clout odf gas and dust; “satr stuff”.
It has cooled despite the continuous raging of the enormous residual heat inside the crust, additionally fueled by deep nuclear cooking..
It has cooled despite the big thermonuclear life giving light in the sky.
Entropy rools!!.
Barring the next cosmic cataclysm, this little rock will continue to cool for some time.
Then, in it’s latest outburst of “political science”, Their ABCess is fretting about Antarctic sea-ice “melting”.
There’s a clue in the word “sea”. and in the word “ice”.
The actual ice which is constantly being shed by the land-based ice sheet is seriously cold, well below Zero C.
The WATER in the sea is a bit salty and somewhat warmer, which explains why it is in that phase, not solid.
As may have been noticed by some, ice FLOATS on water. Thus, some of the thermal energy from the water flows to the ice, NEVER the other way around. There’s that “entropy” thing, again..
IF the sea-ice were to STOP melting, a REAL catastrophe would arise.
The food chain in those parts is dependent on nutrients steadily falling out of the ice as it melts. These nutrients, are taken up by tiny plankton, which are, in turn,eaten by bigger plankton, eaten by assorted larval stage critters, eaten in huge quantities by krill, (tiny prawns), which are, in turn the STAPLE DIET of a lot of fish and all those “fluffy” cetaceans. The temperatures in the water are NOT constant and inviolable, but “seasonal”, with the occasional undersea volcanic outburst adding the occasional twist.
That is why those of us on the eastern seaboard get to see whales cruising past every year, at certain times. They are NOT responding to the tourism advertisements, but to primordial urges involving food and breeding.
The major mentor of the 20th century eco-loons was the soviet union. This explains why Greenpiece and the other “pirates’ did not have much to say about the constant presence of fleets of special soviet fishing factories scooping up the krill for processing into fish-meal / stock-food, etc.
As a wise man once said:
“The most dangerous organism on the planet is a “concerned citizen”.
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“A new paper from the Global Warming Policy Foundation reveals that the IPCC’s 2013 report contained a remarkable logical fallacy. The author, Professor Norman Fenton, shows that the authors of the Summary for Policymakers claimed, with 95% certainty, that more than half of the warming observed since 1950 had been caused by man. But as Professor Fenton explains, their logic in reaching this conclusion was fatally flawed.”
https://www.thegwpf.org/publications/logical-fallacy-ipcc-report/
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Very good article. Our Aussie Energy minister must have missed this in his training er… indoctrination
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