Unravelling the mystery of ice ages using ancient molecules

Image credit: ScienceDaily

It seems there was ‘a distinct increase in sea ice extent’ at some point in time that led to a switch to longer ice age intervals, but the reason(s) for it are not known.

Researchers from Cardiff University have revealed how sea ice has been contributing to the waxing and waning of ice sheets over the last million years, says Phys.org.

In a new study published in the journal Nature Communications, the team have shown for the first time that ice ages, occurring every 100,000 years, are accompanied by a rapid build-up of sea ice in the Earth’s oceans.

Glaciers in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert actually shrank during the last ice age

Tavan Bogd Mountains in Mongolia [imagecredit: Altaihunters @ Wikipedia]

Why glaciers are not always climate thermometers.

High in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert, the climate is so dry and cold that glaciers shrank during the last ice age. Dating of rock deposits shows how glaciers in this less-studied region behave very differently as the climate shifts.

The simple story says that during the last ice age, temperatures were colder and ice sheets expanded around the planet, says EurekAlert.

That may hold true for most of Europe and North America, but new research from the University of Washington tells a different story in the high-altitude, desert climates of Mongolia.

Key to predicting climate change could be blowing in the wind

A reconstruction of the Anglian ice sheet in Precambrian North London (credit: BBC / The Natural History Museum, London)

This isn’t the first time a dust-related theory of long-term climate change has been put forward. But this one looks at what could have caused the Earth to go into cycles of glacial and interglacial periods in the first place.

Dust that blew into the North Pacific Ocean could help explain why the Earth’s climate cooled 2.7 million years ago, according to a new study, reports ScienceDaily.

One of the co-authors was Alex Pullen, an assistant professor of environmental engineering and earth sciences at Clemson University.

“Why study the past? It’s a great predictor of the future,” he said. “The findings of this study were both interesting and very unexpected.”

Matt Ridley: The mysterious cycles of ice ages

US winter storm 2018 [image credit: NASA]

A sort of review of leading ice age theories. A paper by Ralph Ellis that was featured at the Talkshop gets a mention. A point not mentioned: the carbon cycle dictates that cooling leads to the oceans absorbing more CO2, while warming leads to more outgassing of it to the atmosphere.

Record cold in America has brought temperatures as low as minus 44C in North Dakota, frozen sharks in Massachusetts and iguanas falling from trees in Florida, writes Matt Ridley.

Al Gore blames global warming, citing one scientist to the effect that this is “exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis”. Others beg to differ: Kevin Trenberth, of America’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research, insists that “winter storms are a manifestation of winter, not climate change”.

Forty-five years ago a run of cold winters caused a “global cooling” scare.

Ice sheets may melt rapidly in response to distant volcanoes

This is the finding from a new research paper entitled ‘Enhanced ice sheet melting driven by volcanic eruptions during the last deglaciation.’

Another very recently published paper (‘Very large release of mostly volcanic carbon during the Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum’) says something similar:
‘The Palaeocene–Eocene Thermal Maximum [PETM], was a global warming event that occurred about 56 million years ago, and is commonly thought to have been driven primarily by the destabilization of carbon from surface sedimentary reservoirs such as methane hydrates. However, it remains controversial whether such reservoirs were indeed the source of the carbon that drove the warming…[We] identify volcanism associated with the North Atlantic Igneous Province rather than carbon from a surface reservoir, as the main driver of the PETM. This finding implies that climate-driven amplification of organic carbon feedbacks probably played only a minor part in driving the event.’

So two papers saying volcanic ash on the ice, not carbon dioxide in the air, was the main player in PETM deglaciation.
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Volcanic eruptions have been known to cool the global climate, but they can also exacerbate the melting of ice sheets, according to a paper published today in Nature Communications, says Phys.org.

Researchers who analyzed ice cores and meltwater deposits found that ancient eruptions caused immediate and significant melting of the ice sheet that covered much of northern Europe at the end of the last ice age, some 12,000 to 13,000 years ago.

Ancient stone carvings confirm comet struck Earth in 10,950BC

Carving at Göbekli Tepe

The alleged event appears to pre-date the Göbekli Tepe site itself by at least 1,500 years, which seems at odds with the idea that the carvings were intended as observations of it.

Ancient stone carvings confirm that a comet struck the Earth around 11,000BC, a devastating event which wiped out woolly mammoths and sparked the rise of civilisations, says the Daily Telegraph.

Experts at the University of Edinburgh analysed mysterious symbols carved onto stone pillars at Göbekli Tepe in southern Turkey, to find out if they could be linked to constellations. The markings suggest that a swarm of comet fragments hit Earth at the exact same time that a mini-ice age struck, changing the entire course of human history. 

Scientists have speculated for decades that a comet could be behind the sudden fall in temperature during a period known as the Younger Dryas.

Permian-Triassic boundary extinction was due to ice age cold, not global warming as claimed by alarmists.

Arctic sea ice [image credit: cbc.ca]

H/T GWPF for this article on science daily

Earth has known several mass extinctions over the course of its history. One of the most important happened at the Permian-Triassic boundary 250 million years ago. Over 95% of marine species disappeared and, up until now, scientists have linked this extinction to a significant rise in Earth temperatures. But researchers from the University of Geneva (UNIGE), Switzerland, working alongside the University of Zurich, discovered that this extinction took place during a short ice age which preceded the global climate warming. It’s the first time that the various stages of a mass extinction have been accurately understood and that scientists have been able to assess the major role played by volcanic explosions in these climate processes. This research, which can be read in Scientific Reports, completely calls into question the scientific theories regarding these phenomena, founded on the increase of CO₂ in the atmosphere, and paves the way for a new vision of Earth’s climate history.

Alan Carlin – Why the Green climate scare defies millions of years of climate history

Credit: thegwpf.com

Alan Carlin argues that the stability of the Earth’s climate within its two fundamental modes, glacial and interglacial, is underestimated or ignored by climate modellers in their desire to talk up supposed human-caused factors.

The UN IPCC reports on climate are truly unusual scientifically.

Without any serious discussion or even an attempt to point out their unusual nature, they try to convince readers that the basic nature of Earth’s climate has been radically changed after millions of years, all because one very minor constituent of the atmosphere has been increasing, as it usually does during interglacial periods in response to higher temperatures.

During this long period the basic nature of Earth’s climate can be characterized as bistability. In other words, Earth has had dual climate equilibria. One occurs during ice ages and the other during interglacial periods. Both are very stable except that Earth flips from the ice age equilibrium to the interglacial roughly every 100,000 years and flips back again after another 10,000 to 12,000 years.

History suggests that we may be close to the next flip into an ice age, the colder of the two bistability climates. This has enormous implications for humans and all life on Earh. But the upper “limit” on interglacial temperatures does not appear to have been breached in all that time.

Alan Carlin: Why climate alarmists have missed the big picture

Credit: Robert A. Rohde / Wikipedia

Quote: The earth has been in an interglacial period known as the Holocene for more than 11,000 years. It was conventional wisdom that the typical interglacial period lasts about 12,000 years, but this has been called into question recently. – Wikipedia

Climate alarmists are primarily concerned that man’s activities will result in Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW). They appear to have missed the big picture.

Global atmospheric temperatures as well as atmospheric CO2 have been gradually and erratically falling for significant portions of Earth’s history, but not in unison. Successive ice ages are gradually and unevenly becoming ever colder.

There is evidence that very minor changes in the incidence of sunlight on Earth can and have resulted in plunging Earth and all its living cargo into new ice ages.

Earth is currently in an interglacial period, and based on previous ice ages and the changes in global temperatures during this interglacial period, we are now near the end of it.

Oops, we’ve broken the ice age cycle

credit: P.Schubert

 

That’s gone and done it, it should be freezing but it’s not and it’s all our fault, obviously.

Tony Thomas: When Scientists Still Did Science

My thanks to Tony Thomas for this illuminating piece of science-history, first published at Quadrant online.

A great embarrassment to the warming-catastrophic community is that 40 years ago the climatology scare was about cooling and onset of an ice age. Warmists today go, “Pooh! That cooling stuff  then was just a few hyped-up articles in magazines. Cooling never got any traction in the real science community!”

Really? Then explain this away…

Letter from the Australian Federal Minister for Science, W.L. (Bill) Morrison, to the President of the Academy of Science,  Professor Badger,  January 9, 1975:

Dear Professor Badger,
I am writing on this occasion to enquire if the Academy could assist the Government by examining, and reporting on, claims recently made in the media, and apparently also by competent scientists that the earth’s climate is changing and that a new ice-age could be on the way.

Albedo regulation of Ice Ages, with no CO2 feedbacks

The Aletsch Glacier in Switzerland [image credit: ESA]

Warwick Hughes points to a very interesting and detailed article: ‘Albedo regulation of Ice Ages, with no CO2 feedbacks’ featuring a ‘secret ingredient’ – you’ll have to read it to find out more.

Guest article by Ralph Ellis who welcomes constructive feedback – some familiar ice ages charts put together in a way I have not seen.

Source: Albedo regulation of Ice Ages, with no CO2 feedbacks | Errors in IPCC climate science

Luning presentation: geological view on solar dominance

Pierre L. Gosselin provides an English overview of a video presentation in German given by Dr. Sebastian Lüning, a geologist and co-author of the book “The Neglected Sun

This is a geological context that unfortunately is lost on many people like physicists who believe their formulae more than they believe the true facts.

Pierre mentions “All graphics cropped from Lüning’s presentation with permission.” so I won’t copy them here.

http://notrickszone.com/2014/06/29/german-geologist-ipcc-models-a-failure-have-no-chance-of-success-sees-possible-0-2c-of-cooling-by-2020

Wikipedia’s humourless climate mafia are trying to get the Gore Effect page deleted again

A few years ago, I started a wikipedia page on the Gore Effect; the uncanny phenomenon which unleashes snow, hail, torrential rain, icy winds and sleet on the venues where Al Gore is speaking about global warming. The instances are too numerous to list. My page got deleted within a few months by the usual suspects. But it was reborn when another wiki user put up a much more detailed and better referenced version, and I thought it unassailable. But no, the usual suspects are at it again:

Maybe big Al has been armtwisting Jimmy Wales with the promise of a big donation on condition it goes. Who knows.

Contributor ‘Aussie’ notes this morning that the Gore Effect continues undiminished:

Decadal lag of temperature response to solar input: A qualitative summary

I’m of the opinion that before getting into the complexity of numerical modelling, it’s wise to put considerable effort into trying to understand the physical processes at work in the climate system, and the origins of the energy flows that drive them. David Evans’ recent series of posts over at Jo Nova’s site have generated a lot of interesting discussion (despite being roundly ignored by Anthony Watts at WUWT), and I think we can shed some light on the ‘mysterious 11yr lag’ between solar input and climate response.

Swiss geology father throws spanner in AGW works

Once again Pierre L. Gosselin brings fascinating content from the German speaking world

Distinct solar imprint on climate What’s more worrisome,

Schlüchter’s findings show that cold periods can strike very rapidly. Near the edge of Mont Miné Glacier his team found huge tree trunks and discovered that they all had died in just a single year. The scientists were stunned.

“The year of death could be determined to be exactly 8195 years before present. The oxygen isotopes in the Greenland ice show there was a marked cooling around 8200.”

That finding, Schlüchter states, confirmed that the sun is the main driver in climate change.

Article “Giant Of Geology/Glaciology Christian Schlüchter Refutes CO2…Feature Interview Throws Climate Science Into Disarray”

Explaining(?) abrupt climate change

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A very important topic indeed, thanks to Judith Curry for raising it.

Climate Etc.

by Judith Curry

 . . . suggesting that Dansgaard-Oeschger events resulted from a combination of the effects of sea ice and ice shelves—structures that help define the margins of ice sheets—to account for both the rapid and the slower parts of the cycle.

View original post 1,221 more words

Head of Cabot Institute sticks to alarmist climate narrative

On Saturday My lady and I travelled with friends Ian and Susan down the Scott Polar Research Institute to a talk given by Rich Pancost, the professor at the head of the Cabot Institute at the University of Bristol. This outfit is comprised of a small team which co-ordinates cross disciplinary effort from other faculties at the University to help address the university’s ‘two big themes’ of environment and health.

Milankovitch orbital parameters and Arctic ice

skyfall.fr are one of our sceptical European friends

Figure from paper cited later. If the top trace is correct that is a superb match between insolation (P) and proxy. A lot of reading follows.

Under the title “Lindzen lors de l’audit de l’APS : Milankovitch et l’Arctique”
http://www.skyfall.fr/?p=1280

For anglophones
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.skyfall.fr%2F%3Fp%3D1280&edit-text=

I’ll let skyfall speak and then then link the interesting part.

Abreu et al planetary periods not found in old section of Epica ice core

A new paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics (A&A) finds that cosmogenic nucleides in a section of Epica dome C covering 325-336 kyrs ago doesn’t exhibit Abreu et al’s planetary periods. They conclude that solar variability might have been different then. They don’t consider that Epica ice cores might not be telling them what they think they’re telling them.

Here’s the abstract

No evidence for planetary influence on solar activity 330 000 years ago

A. Cauquoin1⋆, G. M. Raisbeck2, J. Jouzel1, E. Bard3 and ASTER Team3⋆⋆