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 years ago, their little villages would have been wiped out in a blink.
Click to enlarge.(Kypke and Ditlevsen)
After 100,000 years of savage cold and shocking volatility, the world warmed nicely into the wonderful Holocene period. Humans moved to Greenland, and things were green.
Unfortunately the warmth started to get rarer and rarer in the last few thousand years:
7,000 years of cooling in Greenland. 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.
But in the last 150 years we’ve warmed out of the Little Ice Age and despite humans building the first coal fired plant in 1880 and putting out 99% of all the carbon dioxide we’ve ever put out, the temperature there has barely moved at all. About 6,500 million people have been born on Earth since 1880 and it’s made hardly any difference.
Greenland surface temperatures ( Mikkelsen et al., 2018)
So despite the climate of Greenland being in the news every year, somehow the award winning journalists and the Nobel prize winning scientists forget to mention that the temperatures on Greenland have been largely stable recently despite humans emitting 1.7 trillion tons of CO2.They also fail to explain that Mother Nature is a thousand times more brutal than anything our cars, trains and planes have done.
But who cares about cause and effect? There’s always a way to make it look bad: Big Meaningless Numbers!
PS: Today in Greenland, a fisherman actually netted a fish with three eyes. Someone should tell the Australian Labor Party. They need it to explain their national energy policy.
REFERENCES
Kolja Kypke, Peter Ditlevsen (2024) On the representation of multiplicative noise in modeling Dansgaard–Oeschger events, Physica D: Nonlinear Phenomena, Volume 466, October 2024, 134215, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.physd.2024.134215
Mikkelsen, T. B., Grinsted, A., and Ditlevsen, P. (2018)Influence of temperature fluctuations on equilibrium ice sheet volume, The Cryosphere, 12, 39-47, https://doi.org/10.5194/tc-12-39-2018, 2018. Full paper plus Supplement
Greenland photo by Johannes Plenio on Unsplash