Alternate Title: Yes, We Have No Anthropocene, We Have No Anthropocene Today! (Sung to the tune of Yes, We Have No Bananas)
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Figure 4 from Finney & Edwards. “Workflow for approval and ratification of a Global Standard Stratotype Section and Point (GSSP) proposal. Extensive discussion and evaluation occurs at the level of the working group, subcommission, and International Commission on Stratigraphy (ICS) Bureau. If approved at these successive levels, a proposal is forwarded to the International Union of Geological Sciences (IUGS) for ratification. This process is also followed for other ICS decisions on standardization, such as approval of names of formal units, of revisions to the units, and to revision or replacement of GSSPs.”
One final gem from Davis’ work is a pronouncement that follows a discussion on the lack of correlation between CO2 and temperature across the historical record, where he aptly reminds us that “correlation does not imply causality, but the absence of correlation proves conclusively the absence of causality.” Consequently, there should be no more doubt regarding the ineffectiveness of atmospheric CO2 to control or drive climate change. It is simply nothing more than a bit player, whose influence has been continually overestimated by climate alarmists. The big question now is whether or not 500 million years of these data will convince them otherwise!
The Katla volcano, hidden beneath the ice cap of Mýrdalsjökull glacier in Iceland, has historically erupted violently once every 40-80 years. In-as-much as it’s last such eruption took place one hundred years ago, in 1918, Katla’s next eruption is long overdue.
An eruption in Katla would dwarf the 2010 Eyjafjallajökull eruption, scientists have warned.
A new study by Icelandic and British geologists showed that Katla is emitting enormous quantities of CO2 – at least 20 kilotons of CO2 every day. Only two volcanoes worldwide are known to emit more CO2, Evgenia Ilyinskaya a volcanologist with the University of Leeds told the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service RÚV.
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N ICE CAULDRON IN MÝRDALSJÖKULL Geothermal activity in the volcano’s caldera melts the glacier, creating cauldrons in the ice. Photo/Fréttablaðið
WUWT readers may recall that climate activists wanted the current epoch we live in to be named the “Anthropocene”, because they believe humans are the dominate force on the planet. The official organization that decides such things, The International Commission on Stratigraphy, would have none of it, and nixed the naming recently. Now, here’s a summary of the the Meghalayan.
Welcome to the new Meghalayan age – here’s how it fits with the rest of Earth’s geologic history
Steve Petsch
Associate Professor of Geosciences, University of Massachusetts Amherst
Jurassic, Pleistocene, Precambrian. The named times in Earth’s history might inspire mental images of dinosaurs, trilobites or other enigmatic animals unlike anything in our modern world.
Even though CO2 concentrations hovered well below 300 ppm throughout most of the Holocene, newly published paleoclimate reconstructions affirm that today’s surface temperatures are only slightly warmer (if at all) than the coldest periods of the last 10,000 years. This contradicts the perspective that temperatures rise in concert with CO2 concentrations.
From the University of Bristol and the “models before measurements” department comes this highly speculative claim that is entirely based entirely on climate models. There’s no actual measured data from any sort of paleo research. It’s science, but not as we know it.
A new study by scientists at the University of Bristol has shown that ancient global warming was associated with intense rainfall events that had a profound impact on the land and coastal seas.
The Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), which occurred about 56 Million years ago, is of great interest to climate scientists because it represents a relatively rapid global warming event, with some similarities to the human-induced warming of today.
Although there have been many investigations of how much the Earth warmed at the PETM, there have been relatively few studies of how that changed the hydrological cycle.
New evidence now updates and confirms a column I wrote in June 2014 that some or all of the highly publicized melting of western coastal Antarctic glaciers may be caused by seabed volcanoes rather than having much or anything to do with climate change.
An article published in June 22 edition of the journal Nature Communications reports that an international team of scientists tracing a chemical signature of helium in the seawater discovered that contemporary volcanic heat is causing observed melting beneath the massive west Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS.)
In June of this year, Howard Dewhirst, a fellow of The Geological Society (London), wrote a letter to the President of the Society voicing the concern of 33 current and former fellows of the society, as well as other concerned geoscientists, that the Society’s position on climate change is outdated and one-sided. As of this writing, receipt of the letter has been acknowledged, but no reply has been received. Given the long period of time, Howard has sent a second letter to the Society, it is reproduced below.
Dear President
We understand that the council is reviewing the The Geological Society’s 2010 and 2013 position papers on climate change which was the subject of the letter we wrote to the society in early June. We also understand that despite the clear interest amongst Fellows – and other scientists, that the society will not be publishing further letters until the new position paper has been agreed. If true, we (the contributors to the first letter) think this is unfortunate, as now would be the very time to solicit informed opinion from Fellows and others as there clearly is not a consensus. …
Climate scientists acknowledge that CO2 follows rather than leads temperature, but they insist that feedback loops drive the transitions from glacial to interglacial conditions.
Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo caused in part by Indonesian volcanic eruption
Electrically charged volcanic ash short-circuited Earth’s atmosphere in 1815, causing global poor weather and Napoleon’s defeat, says new research.
Historians know that rainy and muddy conditions helped the Allied army defeat the French Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte at the Battle of Waterloo. The June 1815 event changed the course of European history.
Two months prior, a volcano named Mount Tambora erupted on the Indonesian island of Sumbawa, killing 100,000 people and plunging the Earth into a ‘year without a summer’ in 1816.
Now, Dr Matthew Genge from Imperial College London has discovered that electrified volcanic ash from eruptions can ‘short-circuit’ the electrical current of the ionosphere – the upper level of the atmosphere that is responsible for cloud formation.
The findings, published today in Geology, could confirm the suggested link between the eruption and Napoleon’s defeat.
by P. Homewood, August 19, 2018 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat
Booker commented the other day how one scientist claimed last week that we now have “the highest temperatures on Earth since the last ice age”. The BBC failed to even challenge this statement.
This certainly is not the first time I have heard claims (presented as fact) to this effect.
We have already seen concerted attempts to disappear the MWP, so it is time to reclaim the Holocene Optimum (so named for good reason), which is generally accepted to have run from about 9000 to 5000 years ago
Obviously we had no thermometers around in those days, so nobody knows what the average temperature of the Earth was then. There again, nobody really knows now either.
But there is plentiful evidence that many places were significantly warmer than now. I present some of this evidence below, though this is probably only skimming the surface: …
There is frustration and reward when an article appears on the same topic of an article you are completing – in this case the Holocene. Such was the case this week with Andy May’s article “A Review of temperature reconstructions.” Andy points out the basic problems of reconstruction using proxy data for the most recent half of the Holocene – an issue central to historical climate and climate change studies. His paper did not alter my paper except as it reinforces some arguments.
This article examines the entire Holocene and illustrates the history that influenced the studies. There are two distinct parts to the studies, the pre and post Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The former is a genuine scientific struggle with issues of terminology and reconstruction, and the latter a scientific struggle to impose a political perspective regardless of the evidence. Because of the damage done to climatology by the proponents of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), both parts require explanation.
Abstract: The West Antarctic Ice Sheet overlies the West Antarctic Rift System about which, due to the comprehensive ice cover, we have only limited and sporadic knowledge of volcanic activity and its extent. Improving our understanding of subglacial volcanic activity across the province is important both for helping to constrain how volcanism and rifting may have influenced ice-sheet growth and decay over previous glacial cycles, and in light of concerns over whether enhanced geo- thermal heat fluxes and subglacial melting may contribute to instability of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet. Here, we use ice-sheet bed-elevation data to locate individual conical edifices protruding upwards into the ice across West Antarctica, and we propose that these edifices represent subglacial volcanoes. We used aeromagnetic, aerogravity, satellite imagery and databases of confirmed volca- noes to support this interpretation. The overall result presented here constitutes a first inventory of West Antarctica’s subglacial volcanism. We identified 138 volcanoes, 91 of which have not previously been identified, and which are widely distributed throughout the deep basins of West Antartica, but are especially concentrated and orientated along the >3000 km central axis of the West Antarctic Rift System.
This study reveals that animal fats preserved in pottery vessels from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site of Çatalhöyük recorded the abrupt 8.2-thousand years B.P. climatic event in their hydrogen isotopic compositions. In addition, significant changes are observed in the archaeology and faunal assemblage of the site, showing how the early farming community at Çatalhöyük had to adapt to climate change. Significantly, this contribution shows that individual biomolecules preserved in ancient animal fats can be used to reconstruct paleoclimate records and thus, provides a powerful tool for the detection of climatic events at well-dated onsite terrestrial locations (i.e., at the very settlements where human populations lived).
The global body tasked with naming geological eras, the International Commission on Stratigraphy, has rejected the proposed Anthropocene epoch, the controversial ‘geological’ epoch in which mankind allegedly dominates natural processes. The international commission has now rejected the proposal and has instead split the Holocene Epoch into three different geological ages, all of which were primarily shaped by natural, not human factors.
Syracuse University professor uses ancient marine sediment as benchmark for present, future climate models
SYRACUSE, N.Y. – Researchers at Syracuse University are looking to the geologic past to make future projections about climate change.
Christopher K. Junium, assistant professor of Earth sciences in the College of Arts and Sciences (A&S), is the lead author of a study that uses the nitrogen isotopic composition of sediments to understand changes in marine conditions during the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM)–a brief period of rapid global warming approximately 56 million years ago.
Junium’s team–which includes Benjamin T. Uveges G’17, a Ph.D. candidate in A&S, and Alexander J. Dickson, a lecturer in geochemistry at Royal Holloway at the University of London–has published an article on the subject in Nature Communications (Springer Nature, 2018).
by James E. Kamis, August 7, 2018 in ClimateChangeDisatch
In what amounts to dissension from National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) climate change policy, a series of just-released studies by working-level scientists prove that geological and not atmospheric forces are responsible for melting of Earth’s polar ice sheets.
From the University of Helsinki and the “no SUV’s needed” department comes this study which suggests big cold snaps occurred right in the middle of the warm Eemian period. My only concern is perhaps they over-rely on climate models. For reference (and not part of the study) here’s the Eemian graph in context. Data sources listed int he graph.
SPOTLIGHT: The most reputable publishers imaginable are misinforming the public about basic geology.
BIG PICTURE: Last September, a book titled The Paris Agreement on Climate Change: Analysis and Commentary appeared. Five people are listed as editors, four of whom are lawyers. Two teach at universities. Another two are United Nations legal officers.
These people aren’t lightweights. You’d expect them to be in possession of elemental facts.
Nevertheless, not one of these editors objected to a blatant falsehood in the Foreword to this book. It’s hard to find a more distinguished publisher than Oxford University Press, but none of its editorial team caught it, either. …
Author Mark Sagoff spends 5,000 words discussing a topic that should appall anyone who worries about science being hijacked by politics. The short version is that there’s an international organization “responsible for naming and dating geologic periods, eras, and epochs.” Comprised of geologists, this organization has been under immense pressure to assert that planet Earth is no longer in the geological epoch known the Holocene.
For nearly 20 years, non-geologists such as Nobel-winning atmospheric scientist Paul Crutzen, have been insisting that a new epoch should be officially declared – one that acknowledges humanity’s influence on the planet. They think it should be called the Anthropocene. (In ancient Greek, anthrop means ‘human’.)
by M. Bastach, June 28, 2018 in ClimateChangeDispatch
A group of scientists at the University of Rhode Island stumbled on something unexpected when analyzing data brought back from a 2014 expedition to western Antarctica.
Scientists found an abundance of the noble gas Helium-3, indicating there is a volcanic heat source beneath the Pine Island glacier — the fastest melting glacier in the South Pole. The findings were published in a study in the journal Nature Communications.
“When you find helium-3, it’s like a fingerprint for volcanism. We found that it is relatively abundant in the seawater at the Pine Island shelf,” chemical oceanographer Brice Loose, the study’s lead author, said in a statement.
See also here (National Science Foundation) and here
As readers of my posts know, I’ve held for many years that there are a variety of emergent phenomena that regulate the earth’s temperature. See my posts The Thermostat Hypothesisand Emergent Climate Phenomena for an overview of my hypothesis.
One of the predictions derivable from my hypothesis is that the earth should be relatively insensitive to small changes in forcing. According to my hypothesis, if the total energy entering the system changes in such a manner that the global temperatures start to drop, inter alia the system responds through changes in the time and strength of the daily emergence of the tropical cumulus field and the associated thunderstorms. This allows more sunlight to enter the system and decreases the thunderstorm-caused surface heat losses, balancing out the energy lost elsewhere and maintaining the temperature.
Antarctic ice sheet is melting, but rising bedrock below could slow it down
An international team, led by DTU Space at the Technical University of Denmark with Colorado State University, has found that the bedrock below the remote West Antarctic Ice Sheet is rising much more rapidly than previously thought, in response to ongoing ice melt.
The study, “Observed rapid bedrock uplift in the Amundsen Sea Embayment promotes ice-sheet stability,” reveals new insights on the geology of the region and its interaction with the ice sheet and is published in the journal Science. The authors noted that the findings have important implications in understanding and predicting the stability of the ice sheet and Earth’s rising sea levels.
From ARS Technica, one of the most incoherent things I’ve ever read…
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The shocking thing is that Howard Lee has a degree in geology. The fact that he makes his living as an “Earth Science writer” and not as a geologist might just be relevant.
Can the Miocene tell our future? I’ll let Bubba’s mom answer that question:
A new paper about to be in press, comes at the end of a flurry of papers and reports published this week that claims Antarctica was losing ice mass. Zwally says ice growth is anywhere from 50 gigatons to 200 gigatons a year. NASA glaciologist Jay Zwally says his new study will show, once again, the eastern Antarctic ice sheet is gaining enough ice to offset losses in the west.
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La géologie, une science plus que passionnante … et diverse
appeared. Five people are listed as editors, four of whom are lawyers. Two teach at universities. Another two are United Nations legal officers.
