by James Kennett et al., March 13, 2019 in CO2Coalition
When UC Santa Barbara geology professor emeritus James Kennett and colleagues set out years ago to examine signs of a major cosmic impact that occurred toward the end of the Pleistocene epoch, little did they know just how far-reaching the projected climatic effect would be.
“It’s much more extreme than I ever thought when I started this work,” Kennett noted. “The more work that has been done, the more extreme it seems.”
He’s talking about the Younger Dryas Impact Hypothesis, which postulates that a fragmented comet slammed into the Earth close to 12,800 years ago, causing rapid climatic changes, megafaunal extinctions, sudden human population decrease and cultural shifts and widespread wildfires (biomass burning). The hypothesis suggests a possible triggering mechanism for the abrupt changes in climate at that time, in particular a rapid cooling in the Northern Hemisphere, called the Younger Dryas, amid a general global trend of natural warming and ice sheet melting evidenced by changes in the fossil and sediment record.
by J.E. Kamis, February 25, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch
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SUMMARY
Research study after research study has now proven beyond any doubt that the 350,000-square-mile subglacial Marie Byrd Mantle Plume and its associated geological features that are emitting massive amounts of ice melting heat and heated fluid onto the base of the Pine Island Glacier and Thwaites Glaciers.
Failure of the media to include in their numerous articles this telling scientific evidence which substantiates the significant and likely dominant role of this subglacial geologically induced heat flow in melting of West Antarctic glaciers is difficult to reconcile with proper scientific methodology.
A methodology which states that new and relevant data should be used to review old supposedly 100% settled theories.
Most of these research studies have been released one by one during the last three years which has led to minimizing their collective importance. Numerous previous Climate Change Dispatch articles written by this author beginning in 2014 have inexplicably been ignored by mainstream media outlets.
It’s time for the media to inform the public that by tying all this information together that a clear picture emerges concerning the significant impact of Antarctic subglacial geologically induced heat flow.
Based on new data published today in the journal Science, it seems increasingly likely that an asteroid or comet impact 66 million years ago reignited massive volcanic eruptions in India, half a world away from the impact site in the Caribbean Sea.
But it leaves unclear to what degree the two catastrophes contributed to the near-simultaneous mass extinction that killed off the dinosaurs and many other forms of life.
The research sheds light on huge lava flows that have erupted periodically over Earth’s history, and how they have affected the atmosphere and altered the course of life on the planet.
The Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was a time of warm climate from about 900 A.D. to 1300 A.D. when global temperatures were apparently somewhat warmer than at present. Its effects were evident in Europe where grain crops flourished, alpine tree lines rose, many new cities arose, and the population more than doubled. The Vikings took advantage of the climatic amelioration to colonize Greenland, and wine grapes were grown as far north as England where growing grapes is now not feasible and about 500 km north of present vineyards in France and Germany. Grapes are presently grown in Germany up to elevations of about 560 m, but from about 1100 A.D. to 1300 A.D., vineyards extended up to 780 m, implying temperatures warmer by about 1.0–1.4 °C (Oliver, 1973).
Paleoclimatic records indicate that most of Greenland was ice-free within the last 1.1 million years even though temperatures then were not much warmer than conditions today. To explain this, the researchers point to there being more heat beneath the ice sheet in the past than today.
Data show that when the Iceland hot spot — the heat source that feeds volcanoes on Iceland — passed under north-central Greenland 80 to 35 million years ago, it left molten rock deep underground but did not break through the upper mantle and crust to form volcanoes as it had in the west and east. The Earth’s climate then was too warm for Greenland to have an ice sheet, but once it cooled the ice sheet formed, growing and shrinking successive with ice ages.
by S. Beech, January 25, 2019 in ClimateChangeDispatch
A massive volcanic eruption in Scotland on the same scale as the infamous Krakatoa blast may have contributed to prehistoric global warming.
Scientists say that global temperatures spiked around 56 million years ago.
And a new study suggests that a major explosive eruption from the Red Hills on the Isle of Skye may have been a contributing factor to the massive climate disturbance.
Large explosive volcanic eruptions can have lasting effects on climate and have been held responsible for severe climate effects in Earth’s history.
One such event occurred around 56 million years ago when global temperatures increased by up to 8 degrees Celcius (46 degrees Fahrenheit.)
The event has been named the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM).
Note how the PETM (55 Ma) is about as far from a CO2 analog to modern times as it possibly could be… unless the PETM stomata data are correct, in which case AGW is even more insignificant than previously thought.
Regarding temperatures, the PETM is also about as far from being an analog to modern times as it possibly could be.
Figure 2. High latitude SST (°C) From benthic foram δ18O. Funny how the PETM is often cited as a nightmarish version of a real-world RCP8.5… While the warmer EECO is a climatic optimum. (Zachos et al., 2001). Note: Older is to the right.
“We’ve known for quite a long time that the carbon stored on minerals is the carbon that sticks around for a long time,” said Chadwick, co-author of the paper, “Climate-driven thresholds in reactive mineral retention of soil carbon at the global scale,” published in the journal Nature Climate Change. How much carbon the soil can take and how much it can keep, he said, are dependent on factors including temperature and moisture.
“When plants photosynthesize, they draw carbon out of the atmosphere, then they die and their organic matter is incorporated in the soil,” Chadwick explained. “Bacteria decompose that organic matter, releasing carbon that can either go right back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or it can get held on the surface of soil minerals.”
Using simple statistics it looked at and dismissed over 200 peer-reviewed papers that analysed the pause and concluded it was a real phenomenon. How did they, and the IPCC, get it all so wrong?
Nobody who keeps an eye on climate research will be at all surprised by this “new” paper. Its conclusions were well aired in April 2018 at a meeting of the European Geophysical Union.
The authors must have been rather frustrated at the time as the paper describing their work had been submitted to the journal Environmental Research Letters over a year earlier, in February 2017 in fact, still had not been published. This was remedied a few days ago when it was finally published — one year and nine months after its submission!
I was preparing a post using Berkeley Earth Near-Surface Land Air Temperature data that included the highest-annual TMAX temperatures (not anomalies) for China…you know, the country with the highest population here on our wonder-filled planet Earth. The graph was for the period of 1900 to 2012 (FYI, 2012 is the last full year of the local TMAX and TMIN data from Berkeley Earth). Berkeley Earth’s China data can be found here, with the China TMAX data here. For a more-detailed explanation, referring to Figure 1, I was extracting the highest peak values for every year of the TMAX Data for China, but I hadn’t yet plotted the graph in Figure 1, so I had no idea what I was about to see.
Figure 1 The results are presented in Figure 2, and they were a little surprising, to say the least.
Patricia Adams is an economist and the executive director of Probe International, a Toronto based NGO that has been involved in the Chinese environmental movement since its beginnings in the mid-1980s.
She is confirming much of what I have said in recent years. The only thing I would take issue with his her description of there being a U-Turn. In my view, China never had the slightest intention of being serious about cutting emissions.
Here, we reconstructed Phanerozoic PCO2 from a single proxy: the stable carbon isotopic fractionation associated with photosynthesis (Ɛp) that increases as PCO2 increases. This concept has been widely applied to alkenones, but here, we expand this concept both spatially and temporally by applying it to all marine phytoplankton via a diagenetic product of chlorophyll, phytane. We obtained data from 306 marine sediments and oils, which showed that Ɛp ranges from 11 to 24‰, agreeing with the observed range of maximum fractionation of Rubisco (i.e., 25 to 28‰). The observed secular PCO2 trend derived from phytane-based Ɛp mirrors the available compilations of PCO2over the past 420 Ma, except for two periods in which our higher estimates agree with the warm climate during those time periods. Our record currently provides the longest secular trend in PCO2 based on a single marine proxy, covering the past 500 Ma of Earth history
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Fig. 2Ɛp calculated from phytane in Witkowski et al., 2018
New research disputes a long-held view that our earliest tool-bearing ancestors contributed to the demise of large mammals in Africa over the last several million years. Instead, the researchers argue that long-term environmental change drove the extinctions, mainly in the form of grassland expansion likely caused by falling atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) levels.
The study is published today in the journal Science.
“Despite decades of literature asserting that early hominins impacted ancient African faunas, there have been few attempts to actually test this scenario or to explore alternatives,” Faith says. “We think our study is a major step towards understanding the depth of anthropogenic impacts on large mammal communities, and provides a convincing counter-argument to these long-held views about our early ancestors.”
To test for ancient hominin impacts, the researchers compiled a seven-million-year record of herbivore extinctions in eastern Africa, focusing on the very largest species, the so-called ‘megaherbivores’ (species over 2,000 lbs.) Though only five megaherbivores exist in Africa today, there was a much greater diversity in the past. For example, three-million-year-old ‘Lucy’ (Australopithecus afarensis) shared her woodland landscape with three giraffes, two rhinos, a hippo, and four elephant-like species at Hadar, Ethiopia.
The Lancaster university-led research, which is featured in Scientific Reports, is the first published field study to show methane release from glaciers on this scale.
“This is a huge amount of methane lost from the glacial meltwater stream into the atmosphere,” said Dr Peter Wynn, a glacial biogeochemist from the Lancaster Environment Centre and corresponding author of the study. “It greatly exceeds average methane loss from non-glacial rivers to the atmosphere reported in the scientific literature. It rivals some of the world’s most methane-producing wetlands; and represents more than twenty times the known methane emissions of all Europe’s other volcanoes put together.”
Their study in the journal Geophysical Research Letters is based on an analysis of fossil signatures from deep ocean sediments, the magnetic signature of oceanic crust and the position of the mantle “hot spot” that created the Hawaiian Islands. Co-authors Richard Gordon and Daniel Woodworth said the evidence suggests Earth spun steadily for millions of years before shifting relative to its spin axis, an effect geophysicists refer to as “true polar wander.”
“The Hawaiian hot spot was fixed, relative to the spin axis, from about 48 million years ago to about 12 million years ago, but it was fixed at a latitude farther north than we find it today,” said Woodworth, a graduate student in Rice’s Department of Earth, Environmental and Planetary Sciences. “By comparing the Hawaiian hot spot to the rest of the Earth, we can see that that shift in location was reflected in the rest of the Earth and is superimposed on the motion of tectonic plates. That tells us that the entire Earth moved, relative to the spin axis, which we interpret to be true polar wander.”
The Paris Agreement adopted in December 2015 during the COP21 conference stipulates that the increase in the global average temperature is to be kept well below 2°C above “pre-industrial levels” and that efforts are pursued to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above “pre-industrial levels.” In order to further increase public acceptance of these limits it is important to transparently place the target levels and their baselines in a paleoclimatic context of the past 150,000 years (Last Interglacial, LIG) and in particular of the last 10,000 years (Holocene; Present Interglacial, PIG). Intense paleoclimatological research of the past decade has firmed up that pre-industrial temperatures have been highly variable which needs to be reflected in the pre-industrial climate baseline definitions …
by J.E. Kamis, November 6, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
Recent research shows that the volume of volcanic CO2 currently being emitted into Earth’s atmosphere is far greater than previously calculated, challenging the validity of the man-made global warming theory.
he cornerstone principle of the global warming theory, anthropogenic global warming (AGW), is built on the premise that significant increases of modern era human-induced CO2 emissions have acted to unnaturally warm Earth’s atmosphere.
A warmed atmosphere that directly, or in some cases indirectly fuels anomalous environmental disasters such as ocean warming, alteration of ocean chemistry, polar ice sheet melting, global sea level rise, coral bleaching and most importantly dramatic changes in climate.
There are numerous major problems with the AGW principle.
Climate variability is a well-known phenomenon and has been frequently, though complex, linked to solar forcing on different time scales. The importance of solar forcing related climate variability is crucial in our understanding of paleoclimate and future climate changes, as well as building climate models. Here in, we present the late Holocene (last ca 1400) climate records from Lake Salda in SW Anatolia using high-resolution micro X-ray Fluorescence (μ-XRF), magnetic susceptibility (MS), stable isotopes (δ13C and δ18O) and TOC-TIC measurements. The age model is constructed by using radionuclide (210Pb, 137Cs and 14C) dating methods. The lake’s high-resolution multiproxy results revealed lake water level fluctuations associated with humid and dry spells during the last 1400 years. Periods of higher lake levels are consistent with solar maxima in total solar irradiance and vice versa. Moreover, the Lake Salda records clearly show dry Dark Ages Cold Period (DACP), humid Medieval Climatic Anomaly (MCA), dry Little Ice Age (LIA), and humid Modern Warm Period (MoWP). These records suggest that the solar forcing, through its influence on the atmospheric circulation, is the main mechanism of climate change during the DACP, MCA, LIA and MoWP in this region.
The Cretaceous Period was “3-10°C hotter than preindustrial levels” for TENS OF MILLIONS OF YEARS! Even if the models were right, 3 °C of warming over 100 years is not comparable to tens of millions of years of 3-10 °C hotter average global surface temperatures.
The Cretaceous Period was much warmer than the Miocene Epoch.
Davis, W.J. 2017. The relationship between atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration and global temperature for the last 425 million years. Climate5: 76; doi: 10.3390/cli5040076.
Writing by way of introduction to his work, Davis (2017) notes that “a central question for contemporary climate policy is how much of the observed global warming is attributable to the accumulation of atmospheric CO2 and other trace greenhouse gases emitted by human activities.” If you talk to a climate alarmist, the answer you receive from such an inquiry will likely be “almost all.” A climate skeptic, on the other hand, will likely respond that the answer is “likely none.”
Hoping to provide some crucial information on this topic, Davis analyzed the relationship between historic temperature and atmospheric CO2 using the most comprehensive assemblage of empirical databases of these two variables available for the Phanerozoic period (522 to 0 million years before present; Mybp). In all, 6680 proxy temperature and 831 proxy CO2 measurements were utilized, enabling what Davis described as “the most accurate quantitative empirical evaluation to date of the relationship between atmospheric CO2concentration and temperature.” Multiple statistical procedures and analyses were applied to the proxy records and the resultant relationship is depicted in the figure below.
Century-scale climate variability was enhanced when the Earth was warmer during the Last Interglacial period (129-116 thousand years ago) compared to the current interglacial (the last 11,700 years), according to a new UCL-led study.
The findings, published today in Nature Communications and funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Australian Research Council (ARC), reveal that the Last Interglacial period was punctuated by a series of century-scale arid events in southern Europe and cold water-mass expansions in the North Atlantic.
by Indriani Roy, September28, 2018 in FrontiersinEarthScience
College of Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, United Kingdom
The puzzle of recent global warming trend slowdown has captured enough attention, though the underlying cause is still unexplained. This study addresses that area segregating the role of natural factors (the sun and volcano) to that from CO2 led linear anthropogenic contributions. It separates out a period 1976–1996 that covers two full solar cycles, where two explosive volcanos erupted during active phases of strong solar cycles. The similar period also matched the duration of abrupt global warming. It identifies that dominance of Central Pacific (CP) ENSO and associated water vapor feedback during that period play an important role. The possible mechanism could be initiated via a preferential alignment of NAO phase, generated by explosive volcanos. Inciting extratropical Rossby wave to influence the Aleutian Low, it has a modulating effect on CP ENSO. Disruption of Indian Summer Monsoon and ENSO during the abrupt warming period and a subsequent recovery thereafter can also be explained from that angle. Interestingly, CMIP5 model ensemble, and also individual models, fails to comply with such observation. It also explores possible areas where models miss important contributions due to natural drivers.
by P. Gosselin, September 23, 2018 in NoTricksZone
Last year, August, 2017, a massive rockslide occurred on the north flank of the Piz Cengalo (3369 m) in the Swiss Alps, above the village of Bondo, located near the border to Italy.
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No data suggesting warming is behind rock slides
In total some 4 million tonnes of rock and mud came tumbling down. The dramatic incident highlighted the hazards posed by rock slides for villages located near the picturesque mountains of the European Alps.
Though rockslides are not unusual, there has been growing scrutiny behind their causes lately. Unsurprisingly climate alarmists are opportunistically pointing the finger at climate warming.
La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
