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By Jo Nova
Cold is the Catastrophe
A hotter world might not be so horrible. Back in the early Holocene, 10,000 years ago, rivers flowed in the middle of the Sahara desert, and they were filled with fish. The photo above is what remains of Takarkori Lake today. If only climate change could bring back the fish?
While we were distracted in 2020, researchers published a paper about an trove of bones and body parts they had dug out of a cave in Southwest Libya, which is roughly the middle of the Sahara today. Surprisingly they found 17,551 bones, and even more surprisingly, 80% of them were from fish.
The people who dined there were catching tilapia and clariid catfish, and sometimes the odd mud turtle, mollusc and a crocodile or two. The lake (pictured above) is about 6 kilometers from the cave (below), and all the bones appear to be human refuse. It’s kind of the ultimate archaeological FOGO dump.
Somehow, this restaurant that stayed open for 6,000 years left behind layer after layer of undisturbed dining history. Gradually, over thousands of years the diners ate less fish, and more beef, goat and mutton.
Amazingly, 17,000 bits of […]
By Jo Nova
It’s another outbreak of the Hottest-ever-Day Fever , where buses catch fire, and the worlds top journalists forget to ask anyone anything useful about the last 500 million years.
Sunday was the Worlds Hottest Day says the Guardian
The Copernicus data might be fine and dandy but it only goes back as far as 1979. The warm weather we are having now is just a welcome break in a cooling trend that started 7,000 years ago. It not only isn’t a record that means anything, it’s almost certainly a net benefit to warm blooded mammals.
The collective amnesia about the Holocene and most of the history of human civilization is complete. Apparently the world is in uncharted territory, except for thousands of rocks, stones, spears, shells, bits of wood, pollen, diatoms, fossilized plant leaves, and all the ice cores we’ve ever dug up. 4,000 stone-age spears and whatnot that melted out of the Norwegian glaciers in the last few years, must have frozen into them sometime in the last 5,000 years. And all the bones of dogs, rabbits, geese and frogs found inside the Arctic circle suggest our world is too brutally cold now. Likewise […]
By Jo Nova
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone reports on yet another paper that shows things were much hotter back in the early Holocene when there were hardly any coal fired power plants, and cars were just molecules spread across hematite deposits, emitting nothing.
Awkwardly, carbon dioxide levels were very low during this five thousand year Monster Heatwave, so climate modelers are forever trying to erase the hot Holocene, it’s just that the dang evidence keeps turning up in the damnedest of places.
In 2002 construction workers in Taipei dug up a giant oyster shell, and a whole oyster reef, rather improbably in the metropolitan area. This was 20 kilometers from the ocean where oysters are not supposed to grow.
One particular oyster shell was especially hard to ignore because it was a 42cm across. When it was carbon-14 dated, it clocked in as 7,500 years old. This particular kind of oyster is not found around Taipei any more (even in the ocean), but is found in colder waters around Japan and Korea. So the researchers wondered if this meant the oceans were somehow improbably higher but cooler at the time. They also wanted to find out if these oysters […]
By Jo Nova
This new study pokes holes in the dogma five different ways
Credit to Kenneth Richards who found the study and discussed it at NoTricksZone
Bones in a cave inside the Arctic circle show that the world was hotter, the climate is always changing, and life adapts very well.
A special cave in far northern Norway has a a trove of thousands of old bones. They are deposited in layers that stretch back from 5,800 years ago to 13,000 years ago. And it’s been a radical change: at the start, the cave was submerged under the ocean, so the bones are mostly marine species. But a few thousand years later the weather was warm, and birds and mammals had moved in. By 6,000 years ago the researchers estimate it was the hottest part of the Holocene and 1.5°–2.4°C warmer than the modern era of 1961–1990.
After that, the cave was blocked by scree, and the bone fragments sat there seemingly undisturbed for nearly 6,000 years while the ice sheets moved and the Vikings came and went and the world cooled. Then in 1993 someone happened to build a road nearby and found the cave. Now a team […]
By Jo Nova
Where are the tears? Elephant Seals and Penguins were forced off the Ross sea 1,000 years ago because it got too cold
One thousand years ago Southern Elephant Seals were happily living in the Ross Sea of Antarctica. Likewise Adelie Penguins frolicked in the sun there during the “Penguin Optimum” of three to four thousand years ago. They had lived there on and off for thousands of years in the Holocene, but the glaciers came back and the cold times returned, and all the colonies were wiped out. All that’s left there now is just their rotting bones and fur as testament to the devastation of Global Cooling.
Thanks to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone for his dedication in digging up these papers.
The Ross Sea is a part of Antarctica that is south of New Zealand, and in the pictures below the remains of the seals and penguins show that they had well established colonies in places where they are unable to live now. The red circles mark the seal colonies, and the blue stars show the penguins. The colonies ebbed and flowed but then were lost as the Little Ice Age began and have not […]
CNN
By Jo Nova
Hottest 12 months in 125,000 say EU Soothsayer scientists
UPDATE: This graph shows the ice-core data up until 1855.
Think for a minute about how stupid this claim is that no single year, not one, in the last 125,000 years was warmer than the last 12 months. Cavemen are rolling in their graves.
It’s “virtually certain” said two journalists at Reuters. It was broken by 0.4 degrees!
Homo Sapiens have had satellite data for 44 years, which only leaves 124,956 years of extrapolation to guess at the rest. Not one journalist at the ABC, Sydney Morning Herald, CNN, or anywhere, asked the “scientists” — how would you know? Do tell us, professor, what exactly was the temperature from November 6,789 BC to October 6,788? And to a tenth of a degree, and globally. I heard it was hot?
Try to imagine what kind of miraculous science makes these headlines make sense? Did the EU team find neolithic newspapers hidden in caves in Turkey? Could they reconstruct temperatures from 10,000 BC to 1978 to a tenth of a degree Celsius. And not just Turkish temperatures but ones in Timbuktu and Peru too? […]
Humans live in a 90 degree range from Marble Bar, Australia to Oymyakon, Siberia. | Photos: Marble Bar, Wilford Peloquin, Oymyakon (and more glorious ones) by Amos Chapple.
By Jo Nova
The “hottest ever” headline is misleading
While the UAH satellite measurements are the hottest by far of the 44 year satellite record, nothing about the “hottest ever” media frenzy makes sense — not for health, history, the long term, or human biology. It’s only the “hottest ever” if we ignore most of the last ten thousand years. It’s just another attempt to scare people out of their money.
The latest UAH satellite measurements may be affected by the water vapor launched into the atmosphere by the Hunga Tonga volcano. There don’t appear to be any clear details about that, but even if we accept this as is, it’s still nothing to spend a trillion dollars on:
From Roy Spencer, UAH
In the big scheme of human history, the world has been a lot hotter and a lot colder. Homo sapiens are 37 degree animals who retire to warm climates, not cold ones. Most people on Earth live in the warm tropics, not the cold poles. […]
By Jo Nova
Only two weeks ago a team of archeologists discovered an arrow made from a shell had survived 3,300 years in the ice in Norway. As the glaciers melt, the team has found some 4,000 items of clothes and hunting gear. Things that must have been precious to someone at the time — like hand-made leather bridles and Viking age knives — peeling away layers of history.
The director of the archeology team, Lars Holger Pilø, is very excited about finding a treasure trove of Early Bronze Age relics (as you would be). But he laments the cause — “the reason they are melting out is sad,” — he exclaims. The ice melt will lead to drastic changes in Norway’s landscape, he says, without seeming to notice he’s talking about warming the world back to what it was. Oh, the horror of a warmer climate that humans thrived in for thousands of years.
Today, some youngsters glue themselves to a road at the thought of another half a degree temperature rise, but imagine having to kill dinner with a shell strapped to a stick?
A 3,300 year old arrow made out of freshwater pearl mussel. | […]
By Jo Nova
The “hottest day” is not that hot, and very irrelevant
So the news cycle went hyperbolic over a single dubious hot day in records that only go back 0.01% of human existence. Remember when “30 year trends” were all that mattered?
Let’s ignore for the moment that the error bars on measurements of global temperature in 1899 would make any normal scientist blush. Who believes for one minute even today we can measure the global surface temperature to one hundredth of a degree? The cringeworthy insignificant digits were everywhere. On Monday the Earths surface was supposedly 17.01 degrees Celsius for the first time in “human history”. Then Tuesday it was 17.18C, Hallelujah. Who are we kidding?
Probably the biggest lie was to call this “human history” as if the ancient Egyptians were measuring the temperature on Earth and every day of the week. Are we really sure we know what the temperature was on July 3, 2201 BC? Maybe it was 17.31C that day — prove me wrong? We have no idea how hot the “hottest days” were for 99% of human civilization. The best proxies we have can’t tell us what the temperature was for 24 […]
Image by Hoeneisen from Pixabay
By Jo Nova
Perhaps Africa could use some global warming?
Thanks and credit to Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone:
New Study Finds The Early-Mid Holocene Sahara Had Lakes With Depths Of ‘At Least 300 Meters’
During the hottest part of the Holocene, for thousands of years, there were deep lakes filled with water in the middle of the Sahara Desert. From 9,500 years ago to 6,000 years ago the monsoons rained on the Sahara, freshwater plankton frolicked in the lakes, and greenery grew far and wide. The wetter conditions made it possible for “widespread human occupation and the development of agriculture across North Africa”. Amazingly, that last quote comes from Kuper and Kropelin fully seventeen years ago. Strangely the UN experts don’t mention very often that in the warmer world not that long ago, the hyperarid Sahara desert was rich, green and filled with water? We wouldn’t want people to start wondering if climate change might mean Chad and Libya could be nicer places for Africans to live? Instead we’re told that global warming will turn into our whole world into the Saharan desert, only to find out that in a warmer world […]
By Jo Nova
A new paper shows islands are young, dynamic creatures, and mother nature is mean. And nothing we see today on Indian or Pacific Islands is unprecedented. All the panic about islands disappearing is nothing compared to what nature does all the time. Indeed, man-made climate change, if it has done anything at all — has been a boon for islands in the last fifty years.
Thanks to Kenneth Richard, at NoTricksZone for finding the paper: Recent Shoreline Changes To 1100 Pacific Islands ‘Dwarfed’ By Change Magnitudes Of The Past
The new paper by Kench et al looked at 1,100 islands across the Pacific and Indian oceans, and even though CO2 levels rose from 325ppm to an apocalyptic 420ppm, the average island got bigger instead of smaller, and only 3 small uninhabited islands completely disappeared. And when we say small, some of the islands we are tracking are mere 30m wide sand spits. Is it really fair to call that an “uninhabited island”?
The world may have Olympic-sized junkets every year because shorelines have moved 40m in the last fifty years, but it turns out that shorelines moved 200 meters before anyone built a coal plant.
This, below, […]
At some point, the ice sheets want their land back
We’re balanced at the end of a ten-thousand-year warm spike, in an ocean of ice-ages, reshaping our economy to try to stop a half a degree of warming.
Those glaciers are coming… | Photo by Diego Delso
The last million years have been whipsawing climate action. While modern Homo sapiens sees two degrees of warming as an apocalypse, for most of the last million years it would have been God’s gift to Pleistocene man.
….
Ken Stewart compared the current interglacial with the last three, and found our favourite – the Holocene — has already run longer than all of last three did.*
Global Warming or Global Cooling: Keep an Eye on Greenland
Ken Stewart
There are several ways of identifying the start and end of interglacials. I have chosen points when Antarctic temperatures first rise above zero and permanently fall below zero relative to 1999. Graph 3 shows the length of time between these points for the previous three interglacials compared with the Holocene.
The Holocene has lasted longer than the previous three interglacials: and is colder.
The point […]
Kenneth Richard at NoTricksZone, found some studies showing Fires are less common today than in the past — including a ripper of an Australian study.
Emma Rehn et al went to a small lake in far North Australia and dug up about 6m of sediment core from the bottom. They looked at charcoal deposits and a bunch of different minerals. They discovered that the top most recent layers had the worst fires for a thousand years. It had all the makings of a Great Climate Change advert. But to their absolute credit, they kept going down and further back and uncovered a story of four thousand long years of wild blazes.
Despite millennia of prehistoric infernos, no media outlets in Australia have shown any interest in this study which came out a month ago — showing Sensationalism is not all its cracked up to be, and not as much fun as Confirmation Bias.
Look at the current blip (left hand side) since European settlement, compared to the fires of 4,000 years ago (right hand side). As Mr Dundee would say, “That’s not a fire…. ”
Carbon Flux showing the intensity of fires in Arnhem land for […]
MIT researchers think they have solved a bit of a mystery regarding Sahara dust, but if they’re right it means the Sahara Desert has already come and gone 3 – 5 times since humans walked the Earth. The Sahara is the largest desert on Earth, and this would be the largest and longest drought “ever” on the planet (as far as we know).
UPDATED: Commenter Javier points out these drying cycles were known years ago. (See below)
This would rather redefine the whole idea of “climate change” — 3.5 million square miles of Green Sahara turns into Dust-bowl Sahara — and it’s all thanks to sunlight. The drought doesn’t just last 7 years, but more like 7,000. And it’s happening over 9 million square kilometers, an area larger than Australia. The major climate models leaned towards the monsoonal cycle, rather than the longer ice age one. So this theory may have resolved one of the 495 contradictions in climate models. Or not. But the bigger message here is that the sun causes climate change and on a massive scale.
h/t to Roger Tallbloke.
The Sahara is the largest dust bowl in the world, dumping 10 million trucks of dust across […]
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 […]
Either Will Steffen thinks humans didn’t exist five thousand years ago, or he hasn’t heard of the Holocene. The Herald Sun tells us the extraordinary news that:
“Humans are living in the hottest temperatures they have ever lived and I can guarantee this will only get worse.”
Will Steffen also says the climate is “complex”, and “impossible to entirely predict”. I guess that means his guarantee that it will get worse comes direct from God, since it’s not possible through science. I don’t know why Matthew Dunn, technology editor of the Herald Sun, didn’t ask more about that — obviously that would be big news.
Otherwise, nearly every proxy that’s ever been proxied suggests there were a lot of warmer times in the period 5,000 – 8,000 years ago. Ice cores say it was hotter in Greenland, barnacles, corals, sea worms, and “swash” tell us sea levels were something like 2 meters higher in stable West Australia* and nearly 1m higher in Hawaii and Polynesia, oceans were 2 degrees warmer around in Indonesia, and 6,000 boreholes sunk in the oceans all over the world show it was a global deal. Australian Aboriginals apparently struggled through a 1,500 year […]
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 […]
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 […]
The message to the world is unequivocal:
“We are heading for somewhere that is far off from anything we have seen in the past 10,000 years – it’s through the roof. In my mind, we are heading for a different planet to the one that we have been used to,” said Jeremy Shakun of Harvard University, a co-author of the study.
Source: The-world-is-hottest-it-has-been-since-the-end-of-the-ice-age–and-the-temperatures-still-rising.
There are two factors in the new Marcott paper that are major red flags. For one, there is hardly any data in the modern end of the graph. Ponder how researchers can find 5,000 year old Foraminifera deposits, but not ones from 1940? Two: they’ve smoothed the heck out of longer periods. Marcott et al clearly say there is “…essentially no variability preserved at periods shorter than 300 years…” So if there were, say, occurrences of a warming rise exactly like the last century, this graph won’t show them.
Some of the data has a resolution as poor as “500 years” and the median is 120 years. If current temperatures were averaged over 120 years (that would be 1890 to now), the last alarming spike would blend right in with the other data. Where would the average […]
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 […]
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