Soon, Willie, Sallie Baliunas, Craig Idso, Sherwood Idso, and David R. Legates. 2003. Reconstructing Climatic and Environmental Changes of the Past 1000 Years: A Reappraisal. Energy & Environment, Vol. 14, Nos. 2 & 3, 2003.
Full text [here] (927 KB)
Selected excerpts:
ABSTRACT
The 1000-year climatic and environmental history of the Earth contained in various proxy records is examined. As indicators, the proxies duly represent or record aspects of local climate. Questions on the relevance and validity of the locality paradigm for climatological research become sharper as studies of climatic changes on timescales of 50–100 years or longer are pursued. This is because thermal and dynamical constraints imposed by local geography become increasingly important as the air-sea-land interaction and coupling timescales increase. Because the nature of the various proxy climate indicators are so different, the results cannot be combined into a simple hemispheric or global quantitative composite. However, considered as an ensemble of individual observations, an assemblage of the local representations of climate establishes the reality of both the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period as climatic anomalies with world-wide imprints, extending earlier results by Bryson et al. (1963), Lamb (1965), and numerous other research efforts. Furthermore, these individual proxies are used to determine whether the 20th century is the warmest century of the 2nd Millennium at a variety of globally dispersed locations. Many records reveal that the 20th century is likely not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium, although it is clear that human activity has significantly impacted some local environments.
1. INTRODUCTION
Are the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warm Period widespread climatic anomalies? Nearly four decades ago, H. H. Lamb (1965, pp. 14–15) wrote,
“[M]ultifarious evidence of a meteorological nature from historical records, as well as archaeological, botanical and glaciological evidence in various parts of the world from the Arctic to New Zealand… has been found to suggest a warmer epoch lasting several centuries between about A.D. 900 or 1000 and about 1200 or 1300… Both the “Little Optimum” in the early Middle Ages and the cold epochs [i.e., “Little Ice Age”], now known to have reached its culminating stages between 1550 and 1700, can today be substantiated by enough data to repay meteorological investigation… It is high time therefore to marshal the climatic evidence and attempt a quantitative evidence.” …
Thirty-three years later, however, Jones et al. (1998) tentatively concluded that,
“[w]hile the ‘Little Ice Age’ cooling (with the seventeenth century being more severe over Eurasia and the nineteenth century more severe over North America) is clearly evident … we can only concur… that there is little evidence for the ‘Medieval Warm Period’… although the fact that we have only four series before 1400 and the timescale limitations described earlier [i.e., not resolving timescales of multidecades to century with tree ring proxies used in their study] caution against dismissing the feature.” …
These results are but a few of the many that have become available since Lamb’s pioneering analysis. Given advancements in retrieval of information from climate proxies, as well as their extensive surface coverage, we review the accumulated evidence on climatic anomalies over the last 1000 years. ..
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April 11, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Holocene Climates
Archibald, David. 2008. Solar Cycle 24: Implications for the United States. International Conference on Climate Change March, 2008.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
Do we live in a special time in which the laws of physics and nature are suspended? No, we do not. Can we expect relationships between the Sun’s activity and climate, that we can see in data going back several hundred years, to continue for at least another 20 years? With absolute certainty.
In this presentation, I will demonstrate that the Sun drives climate, and use that demonstrated relationship to predict the Earth’s climate to 2030. It is a prediction that differs from most in the public domain. It is a prediction of imminent cooling.
To put the solar – climate relationship in context, we will begin by looking at the recent temperature record, and then go further back in time. Then we will examine the role of the Sun in changing climate, and following that the contribution of anthropogenic warming from carbon dioxide.
I will show that increased atmospheric carbon dioxide is not even a little bit bad. It is wholly beneficial. The more carbon dioxide we can put into the atmosphere, the better the planet will be – for humans, and all other living things. …
To reconstruct climate prior to thermometer records, isotope ratios and tree ring widths are used. This graph shows the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age. The peak of the Medieval Warm Period was 2° warmer than today and the Little Ice Age 2° colder at its worst. The total range is 4° centigrade. The warming over the 20th century was 0.6 degrees by comparison. This recent warming has melted ice on some high passes in the Swiss Alps, uncovering artifacts from the Medieval Warm Period and the prior Roman Warm Period. …
It was warmer again not long after the last ice age ended. Sea level was 2 metres than it is today. Since the Holocene Optimum about eight thousand years ago, we been in long term temperature decline at about 0.25 degrees per thousand years.
When I asked at the beginning of this presentation if we lived in a special time, well that is true in relation to the last three million years. The special time we live in is called an interglacial. Normally, and that is 90% of the time, the spot I am standing on is covered by several thousand feet of ice. Relative to the last four interglacials, we may be somewhere near the end of the current interglacial. The end of the Holocene will be a brutal time for humanity. …
The Holocene, the period we are in now, is tracking along with three of the four previous interglacials. Of those three, if the Holocene ends up being like the Eemian, then we may have up to 3,000 years of Little Ice Age-like conditions before we plunge into the next glacial period. If not, then the plunge could start any time now. …
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April 5, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Holocene Climates
Singer, S. Fred, ed., Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate: Summary for Policymakers of the Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute, 2008.
Full text [here] (4,343 KB)
Selected excerpts:
In his speech at the United Nations’ climate conference on September 24, 2007, Dr. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, said it would most help the debate on climate change if the current monopoly and one-sidedness of the scientific debate over climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were eliminated. He reiterated his proposal that the UN organize a parallel panel and publish two competing reports.
The present report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) does exactly that. It is an independent examination of the evidence available in the published, peer-reviewed literature – examined without bias and selectivity. It includes many research papers ignored by the IPCC, plus additional scientific results that became available after the IPCC deadline of May 2006. …
The NIPCC project was conceived and directed by Dr. S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. He should be credited with assembling a superb group of scientists who helped put this volume together.
Singer is one of the most distinguished scientists in the U.S. In the 1960s, he established and served as the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, now part of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and earned a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award for his technical leadership. In the 1980s, Singer served for five years as vice chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Oceans and Atmosphere (NACOA)…
Our concern about the environment, going back some 40 years, has taught us important lessons. It is one thing to impose drastic measures and harsh economic penalties when an environmental problem is clear-cut and severe. It is foolish to do so when the problem is largely hypothetical and not substantiated by observations. As NIPCC shows by offering an independent, non-governmental ‘second opinion’ on the ‘global warming’ issue, we do not currently have any convincing evidence or observations of significant climate change from other than natural causes. …
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March 10, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Holocene Climates
Hormes, A., Beer, J. and Schlüchter, C., 2006. A geochronological approach to understanding the role of solar activity on Holocene glacier length variability in the Swiss Alps. Geogr. Ann., 88 A (4): 281–294.
Review by George Taylor
A team of European researchers has found that glaciers in the Swiss Alps have lengthened and receded repeatedly during the Holocene in significant correlation with changes in solar irradiance.
Anne Hormes of Ångströmlaboratory, Uppsala University, Sweden, Jürg Beer of the Department of Surface Waters, EAWAG, Dübendorf, Switzerland, and Christian Schlüchter of the Department of Quaternary and Environmental Geology, University of Bern, Bern, Switzerland were the researchers.
Abstract — We present a radiocarbon data set of 71 samples of wood and peat material that melted out or sheared out from underneath eight present day mid-latitude glaciers in the Central Swiss Alps. Results indicated that in the past several glaciers have been repeatedly less extensive than they were in the 1990s. The periods when glaciers had a smaller volume and shorter length persisted between 320 and 2500 years. This data set provides greater insight into glacier variability than previously possible, especially for the early and middle Holocene. The radiocarbon-dated periods defined with less extensive glaciers coincide with periods of reduced radioproduction, pointing to a connection between solar activity and glacier melting processes. Measured long-term series of glacier length variations show significant correlation with the total solar irradiance. Incoming solar irradiance and changing albedo can account for a direct forcing of the glacier mass balances. Long-term investigations of atmospheric processes that are in interaction with changing solar activity are needed in order to understand the feedback mechanisms with glacier mass balances.
The researchers radiocarbon dated bits of wood and peat material that emerged from underneath eight present day mid-latitude glaciers in the Central Swiss Alps. The organic matter had grown in the glacial basins when the glaciers were smaller:
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January 19, 2008 | Comments Off | Topic: Holocene Climates
Taylor, George H. Holocene Temperatures and Sea Level Changes. Western Institute for Study of the Environment, December, 2007
George H. Taylor is a Certified Consulting Meteorologist and Director of the Oregon Climate Service, Oregon State University.
Full text [here]
Selected excerpts:
At the end of the last Ice Age, global temperatures increased significantly and ushered in an interglacial period known as the Holocene. According to Pielou (1991), the interglacial is now more than half over, with temperatures having peaked about 10,000 years ago.
On the basis of a variety of “proxy” indicators (parameters which allow estimates of climate change), there is much evidence for the early Holocene peak…
1. Based on studies of latitudinal displacements of terrestrial vegetation (Bernabo and Webb, 1977; Wijmstra, 1978; Davis et al., 1980; Ritchie et al., 1983; Overpeck, 1985) and vertical displacements of alpine plants (Kearney and Luckman, 1983) and mountain glaciers (Hope et al., 1976; Porter and Orombelli, 1985), it has been concluded (Webb et al., 1987; COHMAP, 1988) that mean annual temperatures in the Midwestern United States were about 2 °C warmer 8,000 years ago than temperatures of the past few decades (Bartlein et al., 1984; Webb, 1985).
2. At about the same time, summer temperatures in Europe were 2 °C warmer than present (Huntley and Prentice, 1988), as was the case in New Guinea (Hope et al., 1976), and temperatures in the Alps were as much as 4 °C warmer (Porter and Orombelli, 1985; Huntley and Prentice, 1988).
3. In the Russian Far East, temperatures are also reported to have been from 2 °C (Velitchko and Klimanov, 1990) to as much as 4-6 °C (Korotky et al., 1988) higher than at present; while the mean annual temperature of the Kuroshio Current between 22 and 35 °N was 6 °C warmer (Taira, 1975), and the southern boundary of the Pacific boreal region was positioned 700 to 800 km north of its present location (Lutaenko, 1993)…
This warmer period has customarily been referred to as the Holocene Climatic Optimum (MacCracken et al., 1990; Ciaia et al., 1992; Lutaenko, 1993; Lambin et al., 1996) because the warmer (and in many cases, wetter) conditions are thought to have been beneficial to society and ecosystems. Further, during this period the world experienced “the rise of human civilization, based on the development of agriculture (Whyte, 1995).”…
December 14, 2007 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Holocene Climates
Pielou, E.C., After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America. 1991, Univ. Chicago Press.
Review by Mike Dubrasich
The smartest woman in the world is a little old lady who lives on Vancouver Island in British Columbia. Eighty-ish and now retired, Evelyn putters about her garden, does her shopping, and lives her life in relative obscurity. Her neighbors must know and love her, and they must find her to be very bright, but they may not realize just how smart she is.
Evelyn has described herself as a “naturalist,” but she is better known to the scientific world as Dr. E. C. Pielou, the inventor of mathematical ecology.
Mathematical ecology involves the quantification and statistical analysis of natural phenomena. Dr. Pielou’s book, Introduction to Mathematical Ecology (1969), is the bible of the field. It is not a light read. To get the most out of it requires a background in ecology and statistics at the post-graduate level. However, if you wish to measure something in the environment and do not follow Evelyn’s advice on the matter, you are doing it wrong.
Dr. Pielou holds Ph.D. and D.Sc. degrees from the University of London. She has been a professor at the Yale School of Forestry, Dalhousie University, Halifax, and the University of Lethbridge, Alberta, as well as holding a variety of guest lectureship positions all over. In 1984 she was awarded the Lawson Medal of the Canadian Botanical Association and in 1986 she won the Eminent Ecologist Award of the Ecological Society of America. The ESA has also established the E.C. Pielou Award, a competitive award made annually to a graduate student or recent Ph.D. graduate based on overall quality of the student’s scientific contribution to statistical ecology.
Dr. Pielou has written some popular science books, as well as dozens of technical scientific papers. Her books include:
Ecological Diversity (1975)
The Interpretation of Ecological Data: A Primer on Classification and Ordination (1984)
The World of Northern Evergreens (1988)
Biogeography (1992)
A Naturalist’s Guide to the Arctic (1995)
Fresh Water (1998)
The Energy of Nature (2005)
Her most famous (fame is subjective) “pop” book, and one that perhaps has more significance today than when she wrote it, is After the Ice Age: The Return of Life to Glaciated North America (1991).
In After the Ice Age Dr. Pielou describes the ecological changes that have occurred in North America over the last 20,000 years.
We live in a glacial age, something rare in the history of the Earth. Our current glacial age (the Pleistocene) began two million years ago (roughly). The most recent previous glacial age was during the Permian Epoch, 250 million years ago.
December 1, 2007 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Holocene Climates, Holocene Botany
Imbrie, John and Katherine Palmer Imbrie. Ice Ages: Solving the Mystery. 1986. Harvard University Press.
Review by Mike Dubrasich
In 1911 at a coffee house in Belgrade, Serbia, 32-year-old mathematics professor Milutin Milankovitch resolved to “grasp the entire Universe and spread light into its farthest corners”. The occasion was a party, and he was a little drunk. But he kept his word regardless.
It took a while, what with World War I and its aftermath, cruel depression and social disruptions in the Balkans, but in 1938 Milankovitch published “Astronomical Methods for Investigating Earth’s Historical Climate”. His theory, the Milankovitch Theory [here], was that variations in the Earth’s dance around the Sun caused fluctuations in the global climate of the Ice Ages, one such fluctuation being our current Holocene.
November 27, 2007 | Leave a Comment | Topic: Holocene Climates, Pre-Holocene Botany
