Receding Swiss Glaciers Reveal 4000 Year Old Forests – Warmists Try To Suppress Findings

Posted: June 22, 2014 by tallbloke in solar system dynamics

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Paul Homewood pulls together scattered media reports concerning the European Alps; putting the lie to claims of ‘unprecedented’ temperatures put about by the climate alarmists. Pierre Gosselin also reported on Schleuchter’s interview a couple of days ago.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

As many sources, including HH Lamb, have pointed out, back in the Bronze Age around 2000BC, the climate in the Alps was much warmer than now.

It is therefore no surprise to find direct evidence of this from geologist Dr. Christian Schlüchter, Professor emeritus at the University of Bern in Switzerland.

Larry Bell at Newsmax has the story:

Dr. Christian Schlüchter’s discovery of 4,000-year-old chunks of wood at the leading edge of a Swiss glacier was clearly not cheered by many members of the global warming doom-and-gloom science orthodoxy.

This finding indicated that the Alps were pretty nearly glacier-free at that time, disproving accepted theories that they only began retreating after the end of the little ice age in the mid-19th century. As he concluded, the region had once been much warmer than today, with “a wild landscape and wide flowing river.”

Dr. Schlüchter’s report might…

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Comments
  1. oldbrew says:
    June 22, 2014 at 9:56 am

    Another nail in the warmist coffin 🙂

  2. Bernd Felsche says:
    June 22, 2014 at 10:46 am

    Previously mentioned at NoTricksZone.

    Thanks for the reminder and the impact statement. 😉

  3. tallbloke says:
    June 22, 2014 at 10:50 am

    Bernd: I saw Pierre’s article and should have mentioned it in my intro. I had the argument about Oetzi and Roman artifacts at Scheiderjoch in a climate discussion online back in 2008. I’ll try to find the link.

  4. tallbloke says:
    June 22, 2014 at 1:27 pm

    From the interview:

    “Regarding IPCC integrity with strong suspicion, Schlüchter recounts a meeting in England that he was “accidentally” invited to which was led by “someone of the East Anglia Climate Center who had come under fire in the wake of the Climategate e-mails.”

    As he describes it: “The leader of the meeting spoke like some kind of Father. He was seated at a table in front of those gathered and he took messages. He commented on them either benevolently or dismissively.”

    Schlüchter’s view of the proceeding took a final nosedive towards the end of the discussion. As he noted: “Lastly it was about tips on research funding proposals and where to submit them best. For me it was impressive to see how the leader of the meeting collected and selected information.”

    As a number of other prominent climate scientists I know will attest, there’s one broadly recognized universal tip for those seeking government funding. All proposals with any real prospects for success should somehow link climate change with human activities rather than to natural causes. Even better, those human influences should intone dangerous consequences.”

    Now who does this “leader of the meeting” remind us of?

    N.F. Arnold: Solar modulation of transport processes in the winter middle atmosphere

    date: Wed Feb 13 10:20:00 2008
    from: Phil Jones
    subject: Re: A warning for Feb 7-8
    to: Robert Marsh

    > Phil –
    > The meeting was rather bizarre in scope, with positions ranging from
    > “IPCC too cautious” (Hansen, Siddall) to “IPCC wrong” (see below). …
    > The other talk was more scientifically searching, drawing attention to
    > influence of coronal mass ejections on the mesosphere, residual
    > atmospheric circulation & teleconnections between high/low atmosphere &
    > high/low latitudes that support the extent & pattern of surface
    > warming. Arnold also claimed that CO2 doesn’t really matter. I did pose
    > a question to him, asking how he can ignore all the AR4 model evidence
    > for attribution of 20th century warming to CO2, but he dismisses all
    > OAGCMs as flawed in under-representing the high atmosphere/solar
    > influence. I have abstracts for both talks that I can send on – are you
    > interested to see them?
    > Regards,
    > Bob.

    Bob,
    Thanks for the summary – more than I was expecting.
    If you can send me the two offending abstracts when you have
    some time.

    Cheers
    Phil

  5. ren says:
    June 23, 2014 at 6:02 am

    Six chronologies based on the growth of Scots pine from the inland of northern Fennoscandia were built to separately enhance low, medium, and higher frequencies in growth variability in 1000–2002. Several periodicities of growth were found in common in these data. Five of the low-frequency series have a significant oscillatory mode at 200–250 years of cycle length. Most series also have strong multidecadal scale variability and significant peaks at 33, 67, or 83–125 years. Reconstruction models for mean July and June–August as well as three longer period temperatures were built and compared using stringent verification statistics. We describe main differences in model performance (R^2 = 0.53–0.62) between individual proxies as well as their various averages depending on provenance and proxy type, length of target period, and frequency range. A separate medium-frequency chronology (a proxy for June–August temperatures) is presented, which is closely similar in amplitude and duration to the last two cycles of the Atlantic multidecadal oscillation (AMO). The good synchrony between these two series is only hampered by a 10-year difference in timing. Recognizing a strong medium-frequency component in Fennoscandian climate proxies helps to explain part of the uncertainties in their 20th century trends.
    http://www.hindawi.com/journals/jcli/2014/578761/abs/

  6. Gail Combs says:
    June 23, 2014 at 1:25 pm

    A couple of oldies but goodies from Dr. Joan Feynman

    NASA Finds Sun-Climate Connection in Old Nile Records
    …Feynman said that while ancient Nile and auroral records are generally “spotty,” that was not the case for the particular 850-year period they studied….

    The researchers found some clear links between the sun’s activity and climate variations. The Nile water levels and aurora records had two somewhat regularly occurring variations in common – one with a period of about 88 years and the second with a period of about 200 years.

    The researchers said the findings have climate implications that extend far beyond the Nile River basin.

    “Our results characterize not just a small region of the upper Nile, but a much more extended part of Africa,” said Ruzmaikin. “The Nile River provides drainage for approximately 10 percent of the African continent. Its two main sources – Lake Tana in Ethiopia and Lake Victoria in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya – are in equatorial Africa. Since Africa’s climate is interrelated to climate variability in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, these findings help us better understand climate change on a global basis.”

    So what causes these cyclical links between solar variability and the Nile? The authors suggest that variations in the sun’s ultraviolet energy cause adjustments in a climate pattern called the Northern Annular Mode, which affects climate in the atmosphere of the Northern Hemisphere during the winter. At sea level, this mode becomes the North Atlantic Oscillation, a large-scale seesaw in atmospheric mass that affects how air circulates over the Atlantic Ocean. During periods of high solar activity, the North Atlantic Oscillation’s influence extends to the Indian Ocean. These adjustments may affect the distribution of air temperatures, which subsequently influence air circulation and rainfall at the Nile River’s sources in eastern equatorial Africa. When solar activity is high, conditions are drier, and when it is low, conditions are wetter.…

    An old but interesting paper that I hope Talk shop folks have alread y read.

    Solar variability and climate change: Geomagnetic aa index and global surface temperature

    ABSTRACT
    During the past ∼120 years, Earth’s surface temperature is correlated with both decadal averages and solar cycle minimum values of the geomagnetic aa index. The correlation with aa minimum values suggests the existence of a long-term (low-frequency) component of solar irradiance that underlies the 11-year cyclic component. Extrapolating the aa-temperature correlations to Maunder Minimum geomagnetic conditions implies that solar forcing can account for ∼50% or more of the estimated ∼0.7–1.5°C increase in global surface temperature since the second half of the 17th century. Our analysis is admittedly crude and ignores known contributors to climate change such as warming by anthropogenic greenhouse-gases or cooling by volcanic aerosols. Nevertheless, the general similarity in the time-variation of Earth’s surface temperature and the low-frequency or secular component of the aa index over the last ∼120 years supports other studies that indicate a more significant role for solar variability in climate change on decadal and century time-scales than has previously been supposed. The most recent aa data for the current solar minimum suggest that the long-term component of solar forcing will level off or decline during the coming solar cycle.

    It is worth reading this whole paper if you have not already done so. The study was done ~ 1997 and published in 1998. Solar Cycle 23 began in May 1996.

    Here is part of the discussion.

    DISCUSSION

    …In this view the absence of pronounced 11-year temperature fluctuations (related to the unshaded area under the aa curve in Figure 3), is attributed to the damping effect of the thermal inertia of the oceans. Wigley and Raper [1990] have shown that such damping can reduce the impact of even a relatively strong solar cycle with ~0.1% peal-to-peak irrafiancevariation [Willson and hudson, 1991] to a barely detectable temperature signal (~0.02C). Thus it is the slow variation of the underlying solar signal, as revealed by the aa min time history,rather than the 11-year cycle in either aa or sunspots that shows up most strongly in the temperature record.

    The fact that the aa index at solar minimum retains a value proportional to its flanking sunspot maxima, rather than falling to near zero values like the sunspot number, is thought to be a reflection of the interchange of poloidal and toroidal (sunspot) magnetic fields via the solar dynamo… The point we wish to make here is that the aa index provides evidence for a long-term (low-frequency) component of solar variability that persists through sunspot minimum and may therefore affect Earth’s climate.

    While we hypothesize that the changing aa baseline is somehow related to a long-term irradiance variationon the Sun, there is another possibility and that is that the solar wind itself influences climate…

    Our study suggest that solar variability has contributed significantly to the long-term change of earth’s climate during the past 350 years…

    As of this writing it appears that the average aa value of 1997 will be even lower (~16 nT) than that of 1996. Such leveling off or decline of the long-term solar component of climate change will help to disentangle its effects from that of anthropogenic greenhouse warming.

    Our aa-based inference of a fiat or declining secular component of solar irradiance contrasts with the results of a recent analysis of satellite-based irradiance measurements Willson [1997] who found an increase 0.036% for the 1996
    of solar minimum relative to that of 1986.

    So seventeen years ago Joan Feynman and her co-authors were hinting at the long term decline in solar activity despite the very strong cycle 22 that had just finished.

    The nod to the CAGW gods I find quite humorous. You can picture the authors gritting their teeth as they pen this. Even though the acknowledgement of CAGW is mandatory, Feynman works for NASA after all, you can see the true scientist shining through.

    Our study suggest that solar variability has contributed significantly to the long-term change of earth’s climate during the past 350 years…

    While acknowledging the importance and threat of such anthropogenic forcing, we are reminded that there is evidence, albeit mixed…, for temperatures comparable to present day values during the interval 900-1250 A.D., well before the industrial age. The later part (1100-1250 A.D.) of this so-called Medieval Warm Period had inferred solar activity comparable to present levels….

    It must have really hurt to put that drivel into their very fine paper. Of course this is another Kook 97% of scientific papers agree with CAGW…

  7. Gail Combs says:
    June 23, 2014 at 1:35 pm

    Dr Feynman’s papers, listed with links to pdfs can be found HERE:
    http://nasasearch.nasa.gov/search?utf8=%E2%9C%93&affiliate=nasa&query=joan+feynman&commit=Search