11,000 years of temperatures
Original and larger images, or click this one for a modestly larger image
I find this to be an interesting graph. For several reasons. We’ll go through them one at a time. There will be several mentions of bits of history that we’ve talked about before. If I get time I may put in links to the particular articles, but for now you get to use the search box or the ‘by topic’ categories on the right side of the page… Random quoted text will be from a wiki about a given empire or event.
First up, some general points.
1) Our last 500 years of temperatures have been extraordinarily stable. This graph ends in 1950 (as it takes time for ice on the surface to seal and form a usable layer) and it was modestly warm in the 1934-50 range. Folks quibble over the question of ‘was 1934 the hottest or 1998’; for our purposes, all we care about is that it was ‘about the same’. So look at that little 500 year tail on the dog. Darned near flat compared to the rest of the graph. 1500 AD to date covers the rise out of the little ice age. Something that we frequently talk about as a major temperature swing. It isn’t, in the context of 11,000 years.
2) There is no “Hockey Stick” here. We have a generally ’rounding over’ series that was higher in the past and is slowly turning into a downtrend from about 1000 BC ( 3000 BP ) to date. Run your eye from peak to peak and visually add in the hoop over the top, the upper bound trend arc.
3) Things were incredibly volatile in the past. There are spikes and drops of 2 C regularly and some over 3 C in 50 to 100 year (or less) ranges. While there were civilizations that rose in good times and fell in cold times in sync with those spikes. I think “this matters”. We HAVE climate change, and even catastrophic climate change. It just isn’t caused by people and it has nothing to do with CO2. It happens, and has happened, all on its own. You can find the start of The Dark Ages at that first big plunge about 1500 BP / 500 AD when The Roman Warm Period ends. There is the rise and fall of the Akkadian Empire from 3000 BC to 2145 BC (5000 BP to 4145 BP) “Urban populations there had peaked already by 2,600 BC ” which is that peak rising just after 5000 BP on the graph.
The water table in this region was very high, and replenished regularly—by winter storms in the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates from October to March, and from snow-melt from March to July. Flood levels, that had been stable from about 3,000 to 2,600 BC, had started falling, and by the Akkadian period were a half-meter to a meter lower than recorded previously.
That is 5,000 BP to 4600 BP. So there was a period of good rains, then things began drying. By 4600 BP the population had peaked. The Akkadian empire takes over and rises during the warming and then collapses in the next dip.
4) It was much warmer in the past. On many occasions. Remember that this is the Greenland temperature. All that worry about how Greenland is going to melt away due to our “unprecedented” warming? Well, I count 3 peaks of about 2.5 C higher than ‘now’ and almost the entirety of the graph is above ‘now’. We’re in a cold time, not a warm time. Yes, the Little Ice Age was colder. So?
5) There have been some VERY sharp cold spikes in the past. One of them could ruin your whole day. They tend to land on periods of history that were commonly called “Pessimums”. The warm times were commonly called “optimums” (as times were good then for people.) See the Roman Era Optimum leading into that peak at 2000 BP (then that Christ guy came along and the whole Republic has some issues on that dip, warming after to about 400 AD when the Roman Optimum ended, and the Roman Empire with it…)
6) The right margin shows a dramatic rise out of the 12,000 BP or so range. We know that Golbeki Tepe was built during a very much colder time. Clearly that society was fairly advanced (at least they new how to carve rock well). It looks like The Flood will date from about that time, when the glacial ice sheets were melting under very fast warming.
7) Something interesting happened 8.2 kiloyears ago (it’s called the 8.2 Kiloyear Event).
8) Civilization was disrupted from that 12,000 BP prior civilization until about 4,000 BC, or 6,000 BP on the graph. The volatility is greatest, with the most massive swings and the the least stable runs, during that 12,000 BP to 6,000 BP window. Hard to recover when you have just had a global flood, ice sheet collapse, undoubtedly disrupted weather systems, and no stability. At that 6,000 to 5,000 BP window of stability, human history as we know it begins.
9) Sumer begins about 4500 to 4100 BC ( 6500 BP to 6100 BP). Just when we get that bit of stability. The earliest farming seems to start about 5000 BC in that area. Just after that 7000 BP spike of warmth and the stability shelf that follows it. It would be hard to farm in the violent swings before that (not impossible, just a bit hard) and much easier afterwards. With few surviving people after the flood collapse, hunting would the easy. I suspect that the warm 8000 BP to 7000 BP (despite one spike down) would have given time for populations to grow and villages to expand to the point where starting to farm would make sense. Sumer was top dog in the area until about 2200 BC / 4200 BP when the Akkadians took over (right after that ‘dip’ at about 4600 BP.
10) That dip at 4600 BP is called the Piora Oscillation “The cause or causes of the Piora Oscillation are debated. A Greenland ice core, GISP2, shows a sulfate spike and methane trough c. 3250 BC, suggesting an unusual occurrence — either a volcanic eruption or a meteor or an asteroid impact event. Other authorities associate the Piora Oscillation with other comparable events, like the 8.2 kiloyear event, that recur in climate history, as part of a larger 1500-year climate cycle.” Ötzi the Iceman fell in about 5300 BP, just as THAT warm peak turned into this drop, covering him in ice for the next 5000 years.
10) At about 4,600 BP / 2,600 BC we get the Egyptian Old Kingdom. That happens on that nice warm rise just as we head out of the 5,000 BP dip (they seem to grow through the Piora Oscillation, then flower to empire in the aftermath of Sumer falling). Just as we rise out of that dip: “Old Kingdom is the name given to the period in the 3rd millennium BC when Egypt attained its first continuous peak of civilization in complexity and achievement” So things were a bit disrupted before that. Oh, yeah, the dip… They end in the next dip about 4200 BP. That’s not a very good time “The First Intermediate Period, often described as a “dark period” in ancient Egyptian history, spanned approximately one hundred years after the end of the Old Kingdom from ca. 2181-2055 BC.”
11) What happens in the nice warming ramp about 1500 BC? Say about 3700 BP to 3400 BP? This nice list of empires says “1500 BC Olmec” and “1700 BC Shang Dynasty”. In 1400 BC 3400 BP it has “c. 1400 BC: Expansion and Contraction of Mesopotamian Empires” and the chart does have a bit of wobble about then. What about that peak at about 4200 BP / 2200 BC? Anything interesting? “2205 BC: Early Chinese Civilization” Hmmm…. On a ‘someday list’ is to do a much more complete map of empires against that graph. For now it’s pretty clear that the classical empires fall on the down spikes, new ones form on the rising warm periods. Instability is bad, stability is better.
12) The Dark Ages and the Little Ice Age were no great shakes for our civilization. IMHO, the only thing that saved us was that long flat stable time from about 1300 when the Renaissance could develop, then our modern warming when we could turn that into an industrial age.
The 8.2 Kiloyear Event
With all that interesting history to map onto those wobbles, why look at the 8.2 Kiloyear Event? Isn’t the Iron Age Cold Epoch or Iron Age Pessimum in about 2900 to 2300 BP more interesting? We have some history from then and folks were doing interesting things with new metals technologies. It has the Hittite Empire leading into it along with the arrival of the mysterious Sea People about the time of the fall into the entry of that cold period. The Sea People collapsed several empires and were only stopped by Egypt (barely). Yes, that cold period is another chaotic one with lots of interesting collapses of empires. But I’m going to save that one for another day.
What interests me about the 8.2 Killoyear Event is that it is so “clean”. Relatively warm ahead of it, one giant plunge, then a recovery.
What does the wiki say?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/8.2_kiloyear_event
The 8.2 kiloyear event is the term that climatologists have adopted for a sudden decrease in global temperatures that occurred approximately 8,200 years before the present, or c. 6,200 BC, and which lasted for the next two to four centuries. Milder than the Younger Dryas cold spell that preceded it, but more severe than the Little Ice Age that would follow, the 8.2 kiloyear cooling was a significant exception to general trends of the Holocene climatic optimum. During the event, atmospheric methane concentration decreased by 80 ppb or 15% emission reduction by cooling and drying at a hemispheric scale.
Once again we have drying during a cold spike. When it is cold, don’t expect a lot of rain fed agriculture. It was also worse than the Little Ice Age. Duration of a couple of centuries is not so nice either. These cold spikes tend to last a couple of hundred years, much as did the Little Ice Age.
The strongest evidence for the event comes from the North Atlantic region; the disruption in climate shows clearly in Greenland ice cores and in sedimentary and other records of the temporal and tropical North Atlantic. It is less evident in ice cores from Antarctica and in South American indices. The effects of the cold snap were global, however, most notably in changes in sea level during the relevant era.
Things are worst in the Northern Hemisphere, but the whole world goes when it goes. The wiki goes into speculation about melt water pulses and thermohaline circulation disruption, but when I look at the sea level rise graphs, it looks like the ice age melt is pretty much over by 8200 BP and it’s on a generally straight rise reaching the round off to near flat of the current era. So I’m not seeing much reason to buy that line:
Sea Level History
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Post-Glacial_Sea_Level.png
If it were melt water related, why did all the prior melt water not cause one? Hmmm?
Estimates of the cooling vary and depend somewhat on the interpretation of the proxy data, but drops of around 1 to 5 °C (1 to 11 °F) have been reported. In Greenland, the event started at 8175 Before Present, and the cooling was 3.3 °C (decadal average) in less than ~20 years, and the coldest period lasted for about 60 years, and the total duration was about 150 years.
Hmmm… that 60 year number is familiar. As is the 150 years. Those are rather near certain solar cycle values. Sort of like having one of those periodic “barycenter retrograde moments” and having things skip a beat or two.
Some Spike Counting
For this exorcise, we’re going to do a bit of spike ‘cherry picking’ and / or counting. There is a known 1470 year cycle of Bond Events and DO events. One is a periodic spike up, the other the periodic spike down that seems to be the counter point. DO events are during glacials, Bond Events during interglacials (like the entire chart up top). In another posting I have speculated about periodic “Half Bond Events” when we were looking at just the sweep of history. There seemed to be empire collapses on about the 700 year marks, too.
So the game here is to start from that 8.2 Kiloyear Event that is just so clean, and look 700 years to each side for a ‘blip’ down. Not a big spike, just a middling bit. Then move forward to the next big spike on about a 1500 year marker and repeat. 700 years to each side.
Do you see what I see?
There tends to be a “dip” like a small shelf in the trend on each side, at about that 700 year point. Much clearer in some times than in others, but clearly there. It’s not just a 1500 year dip, it’s more like a 750 year cycle on top of a 1500 year cycle. Sometimes with a reinforcement, sometimes making a ‘kink’ in the rise or fall. The three deepest dips come on about 3000 year centers, so there might even be a higher order harmonic to deal with. 1200 BP, 4800 BP, 8200 BP as I eyeball the graph. 3600 and 3400 year spacings. Add 3500 to 8200 and you get 11,700 BP. What happened then?
The Younger Dryas stadial, also referred to as the Big Freeze, was a geologically brief (1,300 ± 70 years) period of cold climatic conditions and drought between approximately 12.8 and 11.5 ka BP, or 12,800 and 11,500 years before present. The Younger Dryas stadial is thought to have been caused by the collapse of the North American ice sheets, although rival theories have been proposed.
Well, I don’t have a ‘rival theory’ but I do seem to have some ‘predictive power’. Yes, I know, not enough sample size to have statistical validity. Still… 11.7 vs “11.5” is pretty good shooting. Use that 3400 number instead and you get 11.6 that is just about dead on, given the error bands on these dates.
Interpretation
To me, I think it is well worth saying that the next “big down” is most probably going to come about 3400 years from that Dark Ages time of about 800 AD. Call it 4200 AD. I’m not going to lose much sleep over that, but it is most likely going to be our entry point into the next ice age glacial. It will be a down tick of great force, and we will have gotten far enough along in the orbital cycles that the north pole ought to freeze over and not thaw out again. That then starts the ice accumulation feed back that ends with a mile of ice over New York…
The entry into the 1200 BP or about 800 AD misery of the Dark Ages was in 535 AD give or take a couple of years. That means it could be as soon as 3935 AD, or 1925 years from now, that the entry starts. Still not going to lose any sleep, but might want to send the great great great grand kids to Brazil..
What about that 700 ish and 1470 period and half period? OK, 535 and 700 gives 1235. Anything interesting in the 1200s?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/13th_century
has quite a laundry list of empires killing each other off. From Mongols and Huns to Crusades and Holy Roman Empires. Don’t know as that is definitive of anything.
http://booty.org.uk/booty.weather/climate/1200_1299.htm
Has a nice list of things, including this one:
1. Eleanor of Provence (Queen-Consort to Henry III) was frustrated by ‘bad weather’ (dates not known, but has to be late summer / early autumn 1264) in her attempt to bring troops to the aid of her husband’s cause. The Queen’s fleet was trapped by frequent spells of high wind at Sluis, Flanders (modern-day Netherlands, near the Belgian border) before it could cross to the Kent coast. According to Lamb, the 13th century experienced the highest number (by some margin) of “severe sea floods” along North Sea & English Channel coasts. Although the climate across NW Europe was still generally benign (indeed, the peak of warmth of the Medieval Age may have occurred in this century), from the middle of the 13th century, an increase in ‘unsettled’ weather events has been detected by some researchers; the first signs of the descent into the ‘Little Ice Age’. It is indeed possible that the increased storminess was concentrated in the second half of the 13th century, so it was unfortunate that Eleanor attempted the passage of the Dover Strait at this time. (Lamb)
Ending of warmth turning into a lot of unsettled and flooding. Wait a minute, that sounds rather like this last decade or so… Could we be needing just a bit longer future horizon to see what is to come, rather than what is now?
As our period could be up to 750 years, what about a peak into the 14th Century. The wiki for the Little Ice Age says:
1250 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow
1300 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
1315 for the rains and Great Famine of 1315-1317
Oh Dear. So if we add another 750 years onto those dates, we would get
2000 for when Atlantic pack ice began to grow
2050 for when warm summers stopped being dependable in Northern Europe
2065 for the rains and Great Famine of 2065-2067
I note in passing that if we add 1500 to 535 we get 2035 AD as the latest likely entry point and 1470 + 535 = 2005 AD as the early start.
This would be for a Bond Event spacing from the last big dip, not a 1/2 Bond Event, but also not on one of those 3000 year Big Dips…
My reading on this is pretty simple. I think we had The Last Big One at the entry to The Dark Ages and it pretty much screwed things up for a few hundred years. That would make The Little Ice Age a 1/2 Bond Event (thus answering the question of “was it a Bond Event?” with a pretty good “No”.) This matters as many folks argue from the point that “it was really cold so it MUST have been the Bond Event”.
I think this misses the context. It misses the cycles of 3000 years and the Half Bond 700 years. (Dare we call them Smith Events? ;-)
It misses our slow decline from the Holocene Optimum into ever lower optimums. So much so that the Modern Optimum hardly shows on the Ice Core at all (and Greenland is colder than it was when the Vikings landed there (on that peak about 1000 BP). We had a lower Little Ice Age compared to the prior 1/2 Bond event of about the time of Christ, even though it was only a 1/2 Bond Event, due to the lateness of the hour in this interglacial. That would imply that THIS Bond Event, that I’ve taken to calling Bond Event Zero (c) will likely be worse than the last one we had. The Dark Ages. It ought to be worse than the Little Ice Age too. It ought to have made the first stirrings of the turn about 2005, and be well underway about 2035. That this is in agreement with the projected depths of the present Solar Grand Minimum does not give me cheer…
In Conclusion
This is how I see the world. I take some interesting things, I connect them to other interesting things, patterns are puzzled out, and the patterns extended (with a bit of pulling to and fro for checking possible range and edge conditions). It is a system that works pretty well. Not perfectly. But well enough.
At this point I’m hoping for all I’m worth that CO2 is a magic gas than can bring global warming. We’re going to need it, and lots of it. But I’m also pretty sure that it doesn’t do much. Convection dominates. Ice wins.
Being an incurable optimist, though, I do have to take some solace in the idea that it will likely be 20 years of modestly slow cooling. It will take time to cool the oceans and change the trend. The entry to a dip is not the bottom. That is 150 years in the future. Long after my time is done. 20 years means my kids need to think in terms of Los Angeles and Phoenix, not Anchorage and Denver. And maybe I need to think in terms of Miami or Santiago ;-) But hardly end of the world stuff.
The biggest issues will be for China and India. The monsoons tend to slack off during Bond Events.
The North Atlantic ice-rafting events happen to correlate with most weak events of the Asian monsoon over the past 9,000 years, as well as with most aridification events in the Middle East. Also, there is widespread evidence that a ≈1,500 yr climate oscillation caused changes in vegetation communities across all of North America.
While I’m not liking the look of that ‘vegetation changes in North America’, it’s the monsoons failing that will cause Asia to go ballistic ( I suspect, literally) and ‘most aridification’ in the Middle East is not going to go well with a Muslim Population that is mostly young and reaching the capacity limit of the water supplies already. (While it would all be completely survivable if folks started building nuclear powered desalinization plants and planting greenhouses right now, that is just not going to happen. They are too busy vilifying nuclear power and shooting each other.)
No, I’m pretty sure that will be the trigger for massive food riots from Libya to Bangladesh. With at least 3 nuclear armed states now, and likely 4 or 5 by then, the results will not be good. We can likely look to the weather events of the Little Ice Age and the Dark Ages for some pointers as to what will happen in China, Europe, and the Levant. IIRC, there were ice chunks floating past Constantinople…
The southern hemisphere will likely do much better. More water moderation of the climate. Equatorial countries too (modulo the likely drought conditions that will increase).
What ought we be doing? The world ought to be preparing a couple of year food storage. There were recorded periods of a year or two of repeated crop failures. Instead we are going to global ‘just in time’ delivery from the field and criminalizing over a week of food on hand. The result will inevitably be massive starvation. The world is NOT stable, nor is the weather. Both history and the graph up top say so. We ought to be building nuclear power plants and desalinizing plants for places with marginal water supply. We ought to be building local greenhouses for food production even in cold times and with the ability to run those greenhouses with electric lights if things are dark (as they were during the Dark Ages). We are not.
But it’s not all bad news. Recently the world has become awash in natural gas. Fast to produce. Fast to make generators to use it. A greenhouse can be made in a couple of weeks and takes little more than cheap plastic. Cold frames even easier and faster. Desalinizing technology is easy and available. Heck, you can get reverse osmosis water filters for home use. When things get bad, we have the ability to move fast and fix it.
Of a more mixed status is that we will have Canaries in the Coal Mine. Those countries that get jerked around first and hardest. Those with the most unstable weather and societies. Unfortunately, Northern Europe is in one of those climate locations. Fortunately, they have a fairly bright social structure that has come through this before (though, I note, with a few revolutions… “let them eat cake”…) The Levant looks like it take a water hit, and for major events so does Egypt. One can only hope they can turn oil and oil money into water and food.
Russia is already preparing. They understand the issue, so I think they will do OK. Not well, but OK. A couple of their more southern neighbors may not fare so well… North Korea is toast, so will likely take South Korea with them (unless China steps in and makes them a nice new province…). Japan will be fine. Much of their life comes from the sea and they are a creative people. Industry will suffer, but Japan will be ‘late to the party’ on bad times. Oceana may hardly notice. Excess food production and plenty of warmth with all that lovely water to isolate and buffer… but will South East Asia be stable enough to leave them in peace? That’s the mixed bit.
The truly bad bits will be Africa (where deserts become worse and famines rule), and the monsoon dependent areas in Pakistan, India, etc. There is just no way to make enough food and water happen fast enough. Especially with no preparation underway. China typically has a dynasty fall during these events. I’d expect it again. Life and civilization goes on. Likely the One Child generation will be the inheritors of a country built out for twice as many people. Good timing that. Grief, yes. Food problems? No. With all the power plants they are building they will have plenty of power to keep warm. Plenty of plastics for greenhouses and desalinizers. The rest of us will have to forgo our usual plastic junk from China for a while ;-)
That’s what I see from this. Somewhere about 2035 to 2040, sorrow in the monsoon belt and war in the Levant. Oddly not too different than it has always been… We have time to avoid that. I wish we would use it wisely.
Musings from the Chiefio 
My personal opinion was that the 8.2ky event was the immediate bursting of a giant glacial lake that had formed where Hudson Bay is now, the outlet of which is to the North. At 8.2kya the last of the glacial ice pack would have been left blocking that exit and a huge lake would have existed in that part of Canada. The dam burst, a simply huge amount of water flooded into the North Atlantic. I don’t trust that graph to detect such a short pulse in sea level rise but the impact on Atlantic circulation of that much fresh water flooding into the North Atlantic would have been significant.
I have no data to back this up other than the configuration of the ice at the time, the fact that the area of the outlet of Hudson Bay would have been the last area to melt, there would have been a significant amount of fresh water held behind that last bit of glacier and that fresh water (as we see from the 1960’s anomaly in the region) acts to greatly impact the circulation of the North Atlantic.
In other words, no hard data other than the scenario would fit and that it really wouldn’t take all that much FRESH water to cause a huge change in the sinking of the gulf waters. And the timing seems right, it would have been a short-lived event over and done with in about 100 years.
And working against my own confirmation bias, sure it could have had some other cause, but Occam’s razor says to me that the timing was perfect for a lake burst event from what is now the Hudson Bay region of Canada. There would be little evidence, either, as the area would have already have been scoured clean by the ice.
For example, look at this animated image:
It has been suggested[10] that Heinrich events during last glaciation could have been caused by gigantic jökulhlaups from a Hudson Bay lake dammed by ice at the mouth of Hudson Strait.
10 Johnson, R.G.; S.-E. Lauritzen (1995). “Hudson Bay-Hudson Strait jökulhlaups and Heinrich events: a hypothesis”. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 117 (1): 123–137. doi:10.1016/0031-0182(94)00120-W.
Ok, here we go, I found it:
Lake Agassiz
See the wikipedia article for the references.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Agassiz
That could account for both the 8.2ky event as well as the subsequent sharp dip about 1000 years later and that would have been the end of the lake.
Knowing what I know now about the impact of fresh water on North Atlantic circulation, I would have to believe this is possible.
@George:
I’m a bit less enthusiastic about the bursting lakes idea just because it doesn’t account for the regular 1500 year DO / Bond event cycle that is seen persisting for 100,000’s year spans. There is something else that drives that cycle. Doesn’t mean a lake can’t be on top of it and amplify things from time to time though.
So take a look at 4800 BP. It too is a down blip. About 2 x Bond Event cycles off from 8200 BP. (3400 years or 1700 x 2) The event at about 5400 is a better fit to the 2 x bond events as that puts it at 2800 / 2 or 1400 years. That would make the 4800 BP event “off by 600 years” or just about one of those 700 year 1/2 periods. (inside the error band of my chart reading, at least).
Yet the ‘off by one’ is a deeper dip. That’s where I can see the idea of things like dam breaks having an impact. The cyclical event happens, but the ‘facts on the ground’ amplify or stifle it depending.
So we’re still stuck on that cyclical wheel, but with less likely ‘damage’ in the present era as there are no amplifying ice deposits laying about…
If it were all just ice dam driven, things ought to be much more random / chaotic.
Don’t think one lake bursting would do it. It’s either asteroid or volcano, or cosmic ray derived..?
That 500AD time was Rabaul I think
http://elainemeinelsupkis.typepad.com/earth_news/2007/04/elaine_meinel_s_5.html Worth reading
My thoughts maybe a giant underwater volcano, or a couple?
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,233360,00.html
“Good Vibrations!”
Well, I guess I shouldn’t be so judgemental about them. Let’s just say that ever since the “beginning” at least we’ve been buffeted and wobbled and jolted and soothed by “vibrations”. The Sun vibrates the planets. Other, bigger stars vibrate the Sun. Stars farther out vibrate them, etc., etc. Every so often something goes supernova, probably on a more regular basis than not, when taken in the grand scheme of things. Every galaxy has its own vibs and and local galexies vibrate the Milky Way, and so on out to the edge. (And there’s probably other universes vibrating what we now call “our universe” too; but they’re probably all just part of one BIG Super Universe –it has to end somewhere, right?:-)
Regularity is something that people tend to take in small doses (or is it the other way around?) and, traditionally, the four seasons were pretty much as far as it went for most of us during the last few million years.
A specific event can cloud the pattern, a’la Lake Agassiz, but the pattern of vibrations is still there. Detecting them is a real beach, with waves and moons and everything else. Everything is connected. Everything.
It doesn’t sound good, I am glad I won’t be around to see any of it.
@ E.M. “IIRC, there were ice chunks floating past Constantinople…”
Not just chunks of ice, but icebergs, ice reported seventy feet thick in 764AD — though I would guess that the 70 feet figure is descriptive of a wind and current created pressure ridge trying to squeeze through the Bosporus.
http://books.google.com/books?id=jPwNAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA60&lpg=PA60&dq=iceberg+constantinople+black+sea+frozen&source=bl&ots=oQBPq9Azdx&sig=EwWzSCNkByxsHwb_WLzZxR4K-E8&hl=en&ei=82DnTvDOMtGltwfOsJiJCg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&sqi=2&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=iceberg%20constantinople%20black%20sea%20frozen&f=false
I have read reports that the ice was so heavy that it threaten to destroy some of the city walls.
By the way, note at the link, what sounds like a major volcanic dust cloud in 746.
Even without waste heat, a relatively low tech greenhouse can perform well.
http://www.citrusinthesnow.com/
Still, the combination of natural gas energy sources and greenhouses is a good one. Put the greenhouses next door to the power plant, use the waste heat and CO2 to maximize crop yield. A prudent design might even use waste heat to first assist desalinization and then feed the left over heat from that into the greenhouses.
By the way, I am reminded of a line from the movie “Top Secret.” The benign and philanthropic scientist explains that “I have developed a low cost desalinization process for the poor countries of the world!” To which the Hero replies, “Yes! From now on the poor people of the world will have all the salt they will ever need!”
:)
Am I the only one confused ?? Should the graph be flipped so that (-11000) be on the left??
@ Matthew W
Easy deal… just rotate your monitor 180 degrees and look at the chart from the back.
:)
Seriously though, you can run the chart either way, just as long as you have the labels right. Most charts have youngest times to the right, but that is just habit. This chart just happens to be made with oldest times to the right.
It doesn’t take much fresh water in the arctic to shut down / modify the NADW circulation. Just freshen the surface a little and the water from the Gulf Stream no longer sinks because the fresh water rides over it preventing evaporation from making it salty enough
Also remember that the 8.2ky event wasn’t THAT cold, only slightly colder than the LIA and it was very short. The worst of it would have been over well within the span of a human’s lifetime. It would probably have gone nearly unnoticed in equatorial regions. Same with the event at around 7ky.
The extreme spikes of heat would be expected, too, because once that water dissipated and the circulation started back up, the water that started coming North would have been very warm due to the weak circulation before. A slowing gulf stream would allow the tropical waters around Florida to warm significantly. Then the movement of this much warmer water to the North would have had a significant impact.
The 7ky event could have been another lake burst someplace or a reaction to the slowing of the circulation a bit after that slug of downright hot water got moved North.
@SP:
Yeah, good read. Except for the obligatory sop to the Gas God CO2 and asserting that agriculture flattened our cooling. If you look at all the glacial peaks, ours does not get held UP, it has the peak held DOWN. Just about the time of that 8.2 ky event or the Younger Dryas. This is another whole posting of it’s own, but there is evidence for a mighty big rock fall onto the ice sheet causing the Younger Dryas, the water rush, and the peak clipping of that warm spike that other interglacials got and we didn’t get. Lay our peak on top of theirs and we are exactly on schedule for cooling. Just we have a ‘flat top’ mountain and they have a sharp peak at higher temperatures.
But the rest of the article does a good volcano hunt. Nice inventory of candidates. I deliberately left ’cause’ out of this posting (so it would not become a small book ;-) but my suspicions go to most likely one of two things. Rock falls from space or volcanic cycling. (The two can also be linked. Major rock falls ought to impact degree of vulcanism).
The simple fact is that it WAS much more volcanic then, than now. And there is plenty of evidence for some kind of large rock fall in that 11 ky BP to 8 kyBP interval. To me, all of that says “Rocks Rule, Gas Drools!!”…
Then there are the legends. Pretty much across the board they say a set of things all come together. Volcanoes, earthquakes, weather events (floods et. al.). Disaster comes from ‘bad star’, or comet. We saw before that Encke broke up into the Taurid swarm that has spread out into two major events and with a ‘core’ that has about a 3 ky period of major intersection (but with minor nodes). It’s a great candidate for our metronome. Except the DO events extend further back in time than the implied swarm creation date… So even those nice smoking guns have issues…
IMHO, (and way too unsupported) the metronome is orbital mechanics. It pushes the rock falls into resonant orbits. It modulates the sun on a regular cycle. It shifts the interaction of pretty much all the bodies of the solar system into regular resonant actions (and that includes modulation of the lunar tides that we also saw, with long periods in the 1800 to 5000 year range. Tides not just in water, but in the magma as well…).
The problem with showing this is that multifactorial diseases are painfully hard to prove by standard analysis. Each item tends to be looked at in turn, then discarded as “not enough” on its own. Resulting in a null conclusion. Just about where we are now… Attempts to put them all together are treated as some kind of near Conspiracy Theory, and attempts to show the linkage run into the wall of ignorance. SO much has to be explained that the ‘audience’ has quit listening or left the hall before even 1/4 of it is said. How to explain orbital mechanics and resonant orbits in under 60 seconds? Good luck with that…
@Pascvaks:
I see you ‘get it’. Now just work out how to demonstrate in under 5 minutes total…
@A.C. Osborn:
Me too…. Unlike the full glacial onset, these periodic events are much faster to impact. Decade scale (and even some of that may be ‘smearing’ in the record rather than the event itself). That’s why I’ve looked so much at ‘exactly when’ is the likely trigger date.
@Jason Calley:
The Dark Ages had some horrific cold. So much that we don’t have written records of much of the cold areas. Civilization there just stopped writing.
Run gas through electric generator. Use combined cycle with bottom scavenging. Use electricity to run pumps and desalinizers. Use output of bottoming cycle of generator to dump into greenhouse. Provides CO2, humidity, and warmth in one go. Some nitrogen compounds too. Perhaps even some needed sulfur if you leave the gas dirty ;-) Use electricity to power lights if needed. Collect condensed moisture from walls for water.
Pretty much you get everything you need to make plants. Running the original photosynthesis backwards. If you do it with coal you will even get the minerals needed… (tough I’d scrub the mercury…)
@Matthew W:
There is no standard orientation.
FWIW, it looks like a lot of the ice based charts have now on the left. A lot of the ‘historical record’ charts on the right. Perhaps an artifact of the ice guys starting to plot things as each core came up in chunks? Start at now and push back in time with each new core to the right? The history guys pick a point in time to start and then know how much ‘future time’ to allow for it, so put THEN on the left and work forward to NOW on the right? Just rampant speculation.
As an amibidexter it doesn’t bother me at all. Frankly, I had a report I presented with a mix of ice and historical charts. Out of a dozen folks in the audience, about 1/3 complained that they ran in different directions. I had hardly even noticed that was the case… The other folks largely had noticed it, but just dealt with it. One person complained with some force that it was just wrong to run the chart backwards like that… He was a weather guy who didn’t deal with ‘deep time’ charts a lot, mostly with historical… So I’ve come to just accept that one side or the other will be tossing rocks at me at any one time as I span the whole time range.
If it helps, you can think of “now” as a zero point in an X/Y coordinate plane, and the past as a restatement of ‘negative time’ into positive BP values: negative number of -2000 years is +2000 BP. That gives the above type of graph. (Note the zero at the origin). For historical timelines you will often get the BC / AD point as ‘zero’ and positive time off to the right, more in keeping with the usual “positive increasing on the right” that most folks do most of the time. So in a way they both have ‘positive increasing on the right’, just one is using a value that gets more positive with older times…
Doubt if that helps… but “it’s what I do” 8-}
@George:
It’s possible it’s a regular metronome in the water flows… but I suspect it is triggered by orbital things more than a chunk of ice melting somewhere…
It’s hard to separate the trigger from the rest of the mechanism, though…
I could easily see: Tides modulate volcanoes that modulate both snow fall accumulation and sporadic dramatic ice busting events… with the odd rockfall in sync thrown in just to make it fun ;-)
What’s clear, though, is that it happens and it happens fairly regularly…
And the last one was just about 1 cycle ago…
And our present conditions match the warm / stable / quiet ones that preceded past events… even down to the recent onset of more variable weather events as the tic tocs…
Nice work E.M.
“Dare we call them Smith Events?”
I don’t see why not.
You could turn this into a scientific paper and get it peer reviewed
Ok, see if you can find a higher resolution time series from that core, do a Fourier analysis, and see what pops out.
Also note that some things that might cause extreme variation in Greenland may not be so extreme someplace else but I think you already highlighted that fact. The Arctic is vulnerable to changes in circulation patterns which can have drastic impacts on local temperatures.
One problem we have is trying to extrapolate global conditions from cores in the polar regions. A persistent change in wind direction can result in a dramatic change in temperatures in polar regions. Simply changing which way the predominant wind blows for 100 years makes it look like the climate of the entire planet changed.
Ran into this interesting page. Europe over the last 150,000 years. Great job of documenting a lot of the variation in climate that happens… Included close look at the time interval here and with better coverage of the Older Dryas too.
http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nercEUROPE.html
Now THAT’s climate change!
@R. de Haan:
Hmmm… maybe you’re right. If I put a light on the economic impacts as empires rise and fall, I could even assert it was somewhere near my degree area ;-) “Is there a 750 year climate driven cycle of empire and economies?” Need to figure in some way to put the words “Global Warming” and “carbon dioxide” into it so I can get grant money, though ;-)
Could have been Kamchatka or NZ? Since nobody was around those areas as well. Looks like a whole heap of activity at the time. Then maybe a rock hit the Pacific?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Quaternary_volcanic_eruptions
Kikai Caldera (size: 19 km), Ryukyu Islands, Japan; Akahoya eruption; 4350 BC (?); VEI 7; 80 to 220 cubic kilometers (19.2 to 52.8 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Macauley Island, Kermadec Islands, New Zealand; 4360 BC ±200; VEI 6; 100 cubic kilometres (24 cu mi)? of tephra[2][42]
Mount Hudson, Cerro, Southern Chile; 4750 BC (?); VEI 6; 18 cubic kilometres (4.3 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Mount Aniakchak, Alaska Peninsula; 5250 BC ±1000; VEI 6; 10 to 50 cubic kilometers (2.4 to 12.0 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Mashu, Hokkaido, Japan; 5550 BC ±100; VEI 6; 19 cubic kilometres (4.6 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Tao-Rusyr Caldera, Kuril Islands; 5550 BC ±75; VEI 6; 30 to 36 cubic kilometers (7.2 to 8.6 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Mayor Island/Tuhua, Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand; 5060 BC ±200; VEI 5; 1.6 cubic kilometres (0.38 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Crater Lake (Mount Mazama), Oregon, USA; 5677 BC ±150; VEI 7; 150 cubic kilometres (36 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Khangar, Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia; 5700 BC ± 16; VEI 6; 14 to 16 cubic kilometers (3.4 to 3.8 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Crater Lake (Mount Mazama), Oregon, USA; 5900 BC ± 50; VEI 6; 8 to 28 cubic kilometers (1.9 to 6.7 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Avachinsky, Kamchatka; 5980 BC ±100; VEI 5; more than 8 to 10 cubic kilometers (1.9 to 2.4 cu mi) of tephra (tephra layer IAv1)[2]
Menengai, East African Rift, Kenya; 6050 BC (?); VEI 6; 70 cubic kilometres (17 cu mi)? of tephra[2]
Haroharo Caldera, Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand; 6060 BC ±50; VEI 5; 1.2 cubic kilometres (0.29 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Sakurajima, island of Kyūshū, Japan; Aira Caldera; 6200 BC ±1000; VEI 6; 12 cubic kilometres (2.9 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Kurile Caldera (size: 8 x 14 km), Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia; 6440 BC ± 25 years; VEI 7; 140 to 180 cubic kilometers (33.6 to 43.2 cu mi) of tephra (Ilinsky eruption)[2]
Karymsky, Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia; 6600 BC (?); VEI 6; 50 to 350 cubic kilometers (12.0 to 84.0 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Mount Vesuvius, Italy; 6940 BC ±100; VEI 5?; 2.75 to 2.85 cubic kilometers (0.7 to 0.7 cu mi) of tephra (Mercato eruption)[2][39][40]
Unimak Island, Fisher Caldera, Aleutian Islands; 7420 BC ±200; VEI 6; more than 50 cubic kilometres (12 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Pinatubo, island of Luzon, Philippines; 7460 BC ±150; VEI 6?[2]
Lvinaya Past, Kuril Islands; 7480 BC ±50; VEI 6; 7 to 8 cubic kilometers (1.7 to 1.9 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Rotoma Caldera, Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand; 7560 BC ±18; VEI 5; more than 5.6 cubic kilometres (1.3 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Taupo Caldera, Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand; 8130 BC ±200; VEI 5; 4.7 cubic kilometres (1.1 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Grimsvotn, Northeastern Iceland; 8230 BC ±50; VEI 6; more than 15 cubic kilometres (3.6 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Ulreung, Korea; 8750 BC (?); VEI 6; more than 10 cubic kilometres (2.4 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Mount Tongariro, Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand; 9450 BC (?); VEI 5; 1.7 cubic kilometres (0.41 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Taupo Caldera, Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand; 9460 BC ±200; VEI 5; 1.4 cubic kilometres (0.34 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Mount Tongariro, Taupo Volcanic Zone, New Zealand; 9650 BC (?); VEI 5; 1.6 cubic kilometres (0.38 cu mi) of tephra[2]
Nevado de Toluca, State of Mexico, Trans-Mexican Volcanic Belt; 10.5 ka; VEI 6; 14 cubic kilometres (3.4 cu mi) of tephra (Upper Toluca Pumice )[2][43]
11.258 ka; GISP2 ice core event[1]
http://www.geographic.org/photos/volcanoes/volcano_photos_295.html and also the ones in PNG are quite powerful as well. http://vulcan.wr.usgs.gov/Volcanoes/PapuaNewGuinea/Maps/map_papua_new_guinea_volcanoes.html
@Pascvaks: See the connections here & now: http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/12/13/donald-scott-voyager-1-updates-solar-electron-flux/#comments
Ok, I think I am getting a grip on a mechanism that I think can account for why we went from 40ky to 100ky glacial cycles and why we have the interstadials during the glaciations. I believe it has to do with the persistent North Atlantic weather systems around Iceland.
In the late Pliocene epoch of the Neogene period we have isthmus of Panama rising and cutting off the equatorial flow between Atlantic and Pacific and the development of the NADW (North Atlantic Deep Water) flow from pole to pole. At this point the ocean is very warm but climate (and the ocean) begin a general cooling trend starting at around this time. This is also shortly after a deep water connection to the Arctic is established from the subsidence of a ridge East of Greenland. This opened up the Fram as a deep water connection to the Arctic Ocean.
So the ocean is warm. Now normally (during interglacials) we have a situation where we have a dominant low pressure system roughly over iceland and a high pressure system below that. This causes strong Westerlies are are responsible for transporting the warm gulf waters from the East coast of the US to Europe. Sometimes that pattern reverses. When that happens the Westerlies stop or reverse. This stops the flow of warm water to Europe, slows down the Gulf Stream, and results in Northern Hemisphere cooling.
Now don’t think of it so much as a single low pressure area, think more “Hadley cell”. The edge between the polar and mid-latitude cell changes with heat content of the atmosphere. When it is hotter, that interface moves North (Hadley cell grows, Ferrel cell moves North, Polar cell shrinks) , when it is cooler, that interface moves South (polar cell gets larger, mid-latitude Ferrel cell moves South, and the Hadley cell shrinks).
The impact of this is that the Westerlies move considerably South of the present location and the wind direction of the subarctic changes from Westerly to variable or even Easterly. This results in the Northern Latitudes getting much colder. Even Japan would get much colder as the pattern that draws much of the Japan current moves South.
But remember, we are still in the late Pliocene. The ocean is very warm. The only real impact of this is to reduce ocean circulation flows and the Northern regions cool but not enough to cause a glaciation. There is still too much heat in the ocean. Now these circulation cell boundaries tend to move with solar insolation. Among other cycles is a very dominant 40K year cycle and a 100K cycle that is of less energy difference but important.
So over time the ocean is generally cooling due to the normal circulation patterns, Earth warms and cools in response to these insolation patterns, but not enough to trigger a glaciation … until one day … bang! The ocean has cooled enough so when we go onto a period of low insolation glaciers form. But the glaciation doesn’t last long and isn’t all that extensive and as soon as we get a little more insolation on the upside of that 40K cycle the ocean has enough heat that we come out of it fairly easily. But as we bump along on this 40ky cycle the glaciations are becoming colder and the interglacials not quite as warm. We begin to oscillate but with an obvious negative bias. The oceans are still gradually cooling. Now remember that superimposed on this 40K cycle is a 100K cycle. Every fifth 40K cycle lands right on a 100K. Other 40k cycles fall at other locations of the phase of the 100K.
Now the ocean has cooled enough so we go into one of these 40K cycles and that glaciation is the deepest yet of the 40K. We get a little more glaciation than before. Now depending on where we are in that 100K cycle, maybe we just don’t quite have enough insolation to pull us out of the interglacial. It warms (we get an interstadial) but it doesn’t warm quite enough or it warms enough to melt a good bit of the ice but a glacial lake outburst, maybe on Greenland, maybe in North America causes a flood of cold fresh water on the Arctic that shuts down the Gulf Stream just as we are at maximum insolation, we get cold for a bit, that causes the glaciers to expand a little, the increased albedo at that time results in the loss of too much energy for us to recover because by the time the ocean circulation stabilizes we are sliding down the back side of that insolation curve and we “missed” the opportunity to come out of it and go back into glaciation. So in this case it is increased glaciation resulting in increased melt water in the arctic suppressing the circulation and the oceans have now cooled to the extent that they can’t pull us out of it with added heat from insolation alone.
If I am correct and if the abyssal ocean is still cooling overall, then we will get to a point where a 100K cycle will not be able to push us out of a glacial either when the 40K cycle is negative and I believe that almost happened once about 500K years ago. We had an interstadial that was actually pretty warm, warmer than the previous interglacial(!), at only 50K years or so into the cycle. Then we briefly come out for a weak interglacial.
If you look at this one:
You can almost see that old 40k year cycle superimposed on the 100K cycle but they are interstadials, rather warm ones, and not integlacials.
During these interstadials, I believe it is melt water that sends us right back into glaciation THAT is the hysteresis factor for cold. The only thing that can break that cycle is for insolation to be high for long enough for us to get though that temporary period of cooling and still continue to warm after. Once we are out of it long enough for all the ice to melt, we are golden until insolation finally declines to a point where the glaciers begin to take hold again. Notice the slide into glaciation is slow, the rise out is fast (though bumpy). That fast rise is due to the ocean circulation starting again, the cold periods are due to it shutting down.
Most importantly these conditions are conditions in only GREENLAND. I believe during these cold periods in Greenland, the climate in places like the Caribbean and Mediterranean actually get warmer. The Gulf Stream is much slower allowing warmer water to stay longer in the Caribbean. The slower current cuts East much farther South than now and would cross the Atlantic at about Spain. The current then would curve South along the coast of Africa getting saltier until it finally dives in the Southern Hemisphere rather than in the subpolar region.
The benthic North Atlantic and South Pacific would become stagnant.
I believe we are pretty close to losing a 100K cycle soon (in Geological time).
@George:
Sounds reasonable to me. I’d not thought of it in that depth, but had reached the conclusion that the 40 k yr cycle was when we were warm enough for them all to break through, the 100 k when only a few could do it. Based mostly on this graph that shows us steadily getting colder, and not enough mechanism thought:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f7/Five_Myr_Climate_Change.svg
but that was missing an amplification step…
Chiefio’s 8,200 year analysis, all based on the hard science of isotope measurements of oxygen trapped in ice cores leaves climate alarmism flat busted.
To go back further one needs to find oxygen trapped in sediments and those show that the last 8,200 years is the tail end of a cooling trend that started 65 million years ago in the Eocene.
Remember that mammals got their big chance following the departure of the dinosaurs ~75 million years ago; mammals flourished mightily during the warm Eocene.
Since the Eocene the cooling has been challenging for apes as evidenced by the near extinction of homo sapiens during the last glacial cycle. Roughly 20 of the species most closely related to us did become extinct.
Jo Nova put it together superbly. Here is one of the graphs she used:
Note that the polar ocean in the 1950s is ~12 Kelvin cooler today than at the peak of the PETM. That should correspond to about 4 Kelvin cooler at low latitudes. I wonder how William Connolley and his goons failed to delete the above graph from Wikipedia?
What would it take to get us back to the balmy conditions of the Eocene? Arctic temperatures have risen about 2.4 Kelvin since 1850 so we need to keep that pace up for at least another 750 years. Fat chance but we can hope…………..
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/12/111213164751.htm Here comes some Global Cooling!
Thanks E.M. for an informative and insightful article.
Looking at the Milankovitch cycles I’m not sure whether we’ll get pluinged into another glacial or whether the current several million years of glacial/interglacial cycles is coming to an end. Not the concern of the current generation perhaps, as you say. Certainly things are looking cooler immediately ahead, going on our projection of solar activity over at the talkshop.
Another way to conceptualise the history of temperature wiggle through the holocene is to think of the initial big swing out of the last glacial and drop into the Younger Dryas as the first bounce of the ball. After that major oscillation, the size of the swings naturally decays and the height of the top of the bounce gets lower each time (Modifications caused by solar-planetary cycles notwithstanding). Perhaps the inertia of a stable climate coupled with a solar downturn plus unfavourable shifts in Milankovitch forcings is what will allow a glacial period to begin.
Despite the problems northern Europe ran into in the little ice age, life continued and flourished again quite rapidly after the decimating effect of the black death halving the population. The worrying thing for modern humans is that we still don’t know what the black death was. It wasn’t beubonic plague, judging by the speed it moved at.
IMO, nature will sort it all out so that the human population is at the optimum size for it’s successful regeneration following whatever we have coming to us, whenever it comes.
Don’t worry be happy.
FYI – Not the graph I went off looking for but it may be of some use FWIW –
@George (01:18:09) – Liked your 40K Vibrations. I’d expect we come out of the dips in temps the way we went in, so the “40K Vib” should kick back in as dominating the climate pattern before Antarctica goes back to growing grapes and building Condos for the Rich ‘n Famous.
@SP: Nice article on gamma rays from supernova, but what does it have to do with global cooling coming?
@Tallbloke: I’d be unworried and happier if ‘optimum range’ of things did not all too often include a data point at zero… So, at the talkshop, you guys getting any interesting ideas on likely solar changes? (feel free to toss links this way – I’m pretty sure solar changes matter…)
@Pascvaks: I was thinking of making a graph like that! Thanks for saving me that time!
http://books.google.com.au/books?id=zr_-7VVWyR4C&pg=PA181&lpg=PA181&dq=supernova+cooling+earth&source=bl&ots=KP77XiVtnK&sig=Bq5ls2iLffXCbpxgsk36JScobnY&hl=en&sa=X&ei=r4fpTsHOGciaiAe85aixBw&ved=0CDIQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=supernova%20cooling%20earth&f=false
http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/research/CLOUD-en.html
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/07/news-flash-cerns-orders-blackout-of-cosmic-ray-project-news.html
Supernova’s cool the earth the fact we have just seen it means the radiation is hitting us as well…
Nice to know Tallbloke is still on the loose, unmuzzled. He mentioned the “Younger Dryas”, a stunningly abrupt climate change (both down and up).
The rapid temperature swings associated with the Younger Dryas were studied by Richard Alley (Penn State) at some length. You would think that event alone would convince him that CO2 is at best a minor player in the Global Climate game.
I’m also wondering, was this increase in cosmic rays from that supernova? And the sudden drop in temperature. A supernova is much much more powerful then a few ppm change in CO2 that’s for sure
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/584180.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=J68kKWX306Q 5000-10,000 years ago — Cooling cause?
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/09/07/scitech/main20102510.shtml
http://news.yahoo.com/2-000-old-supernova-mystery-solved-nasa-telescopes-203402466.html
185AD Supernova did it cause a drop then? http://jonova.s3.amazonaws.com/graphs/lappi/gisp-last-10000-new.png
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/06/110608-new-supernova-space-science-stars-universe/ Also, maybe different types of supernova produce different particles which seed clouds differently?
Since supernova’s produce the clouds on earth. So if there are different amounts of energy hitting, then the temperature changes. This is why the temperature swings so much and we can’t work out why.
The Sun and the Cosmic rays effect the temperature on earth, not trace gases…
http://www.cbn.com/CBNnews/584180.aspx I fear global cooling more then warming
Volcanoes, Cosmic rays, Asteroids are more likely to cause us problems…
When you have a decline in the solar wind and the solar magnetic field, you get more cosmic rays making it into the inner solar system. The solar wind normally sweeps these particles out.
If you look at these graphs:
http://www.swpc.noaa.gov/rt_plots/Xray.gif (X-ray flux)
http://neutronm.bartol.udel.edu/~pyle/TheMcPlot2.gif (neutron count — GCRs)
http://www2.nict.go.jp/y/y223/sept/ace/1day/ace.gif (solar wind)
You will notice that when you get more x-rays you get fewer neutrons. Same relationship with solar wind. When the solar wind picks up, neutrons will drop. When X-rays pick up, neutrons will drop. X-rays are generated by activity from sunspots that also generate solar wind. When you have a quiet sun, you have low x-rays, low solar wind, high neutrons.
http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2011/03/first-undersea-volcano-explosion-verified.html Their work also shows that the release of CO2 from the deeper mantle to the Earth’s atmosphere, at least in certain parts of mid-ocean ridges, is much higher than had previously been imagined.
Given that mid-ocean ridges constitute the largest volcanic system on Earth, this discovery has important implications for the global carbon cycle which have yet to be explored.
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Chiefio: All your questions are resolved….look out for our new paper:
FIVE CLIMATE FORCING MECHANISMS GOVERN 10,000 YEARS OF
CLIMATE CHANGE…..to be out until the years end…..
all climate puzzle pieces will fall into their place….no hypothesizing….
all facts and calculations….Cheers JS
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