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LIA, global or not?

Discussion in 'Environmental Discussion' started by tochatihu, Nov 21, 2014.

  1. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Little Ice Age was global: Implications for current global warming -- ScienceDaily


    Chambers et al. say it was. They don’t say it was cold in Tierra del Fuego though, they say it was dry. Sciencedaily normally gives us the citation, but this time I had to hunt.


    The 'Little Ice Age' in the Southern Hemisphere in the context of the last 3000 years: Peat-based proxy-climate data from Tierra del Fuego

    Frank M Chambers, Sally A Brain, Dmitri Mauquoy, Julia McCarroll and Tim Daley

    The Holocene published online 2 October 2014

    Frank M Chambers, Sally A Brain, Dmitri Mauquoy, Julia McCarroll


    It’s another example of science moving towards better understanding. Can’t understand how ‘AGW gatekeepers’ also let this one through :).
     
  2. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    Solar studies continue and we are still learning a lot about that nuclear furnace in the sky:
    [​IMG]
    "The bright light in the lower right of the sun shows an X-class solar flare on Oct. 26, 2014, as captured by NASA's SDO. This was the third X-class flare in 48 hours, which erupted from the largest active region seen on the sun in 24 years." Source: One Giant Sunspot, 6 Substantial Flares | NASA

    Although the 11 year cycle is known, the specific sunspots and flares are no more predictable than steam bubbles in a boiling pot of water . . . a bit like the weather.

    I can appreciate there was a mini-ICE age and it was global. Three thousand year ago, we have proxy metrics, better than none, about historical weather and climate. As for solar observations, they are even more remote.
    But these have no bearing on the earth's heat-energy balance today.

    This is why my primary interest remains in current metrics . . . facts and data. If the solar heat flux changes, the models will have to change and we might want to make more CO{2} to stave-off another ice age. But today's metrics suggest no.

    Bob Wilson
     
    #2 bwilson4web, Nov 22, 2014
    Last edited: Nov 23, 2014
  3. austingreen

    austingreen Senior Member

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    nice


    First lets look at who the gate keepers were, and if they still had power to stop this.

    First Pachauri, Mr. it has to be ghg what else could it be (on why the asian glaciers were going to melt faster than any peer reviewed paper would dare). This isn't likely to be picked up by the IPCC and he has no power to squelch it. He is lucky to be holding on to his job, and I wish the US would threaten to defend if he isn't forced to step down.

    Phil Jones, totally dishonored by climate gate. If he tried for sure this time

    Gavin Schmidt, blogger in RealClimate and climate scientist. I don't know but more people read watts up with that than his blog now. He likely doesn't have the power to squelch anything today. We can see what he writes.

    We can't pretend there were no gate keepers simply because once caught they are no longer as effective. There is some fingerprint from the gate keeping here.

    Even though the data doesn't really do anything much here, he took time out to point out his data could support the IPCC point of view, and explain one of the troubling questions about the models not being accurate.

    OK so let's get back to the science here. The little ice age (LIA) was speculated as never to have existed as a global phenomina by MBH and posted about in RealCLimate as only being regional to help explain how mbh was not using poor statistics to flatten past climates. The evidence of it being regional? There were not proxies in the southern hemisphere. In otherwords these folks claimed that absence of evidence was evidence of absence. That could work as a hypothesis, until you look for the data. Tada, after less than a decade these palo proxies were looked for and found, and we must now reject the rejection of the LIA. It never should have made it past a minor idea if not for the blogisphere. Hypothesis is fine, but we should look for evidence to support them, instead of blog posts to defend.
     
  4. mojo

    mojo Senior Member

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    They do say it was colder in Tierra del Fuego .

    "The data show that the most extreme cold phases of the Little Ice Age -- in the mid-15th and then again in the early 18th centuries -- were synchronous in Europe and South America. There is one stark difference: while in continental north-west Europe, bogs became wetter, in Tierra del Fuego, the bog became drier -- in both cases probably a result of a dramatic equator-ward shift of moisture-bearing winds."
     
  5. bwilson4web

    bwilson4web BMW i3 and Model 3

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    I would be more interested if:
    1. Unscramble the egg - regardless of how much is alleged about malfeasance in the past, that train has left the station. Hitting on half a dozen 'evil doers' won't make man-made, global warming go away but eventually looks more like ad hominem than a rational discussion of facts and data.
    2. Satellite observations - today we have satellite observations of the sun, earth's radiant spectrum, global ice inventory, sea level, and global CO{2} observations that will soon be even more timely and accurate. The global warming models will become more accurate, higher resolution, and timely . . . that egg can't be unbroken.
    3. Ice core - Antarctica is pretty close to the southern hemisphere. Then there are these rapidly melting, Southern glaciers. Surely one or more have 3-6,000 years of melt layers. Bring out the confirming ice core data.
    4. King Canute - commanding the sea not to rise has not been terribly successful.
    I appreciate the effort to apply the same methodology to another peat bog. But like the Baffin Island speculations of Caribou tainted yellow-snow throwing off the C14 data, one data point contributes but does not a record make.

    Bob Wilson
     
  6. tochatihu

    tochatihu Senior Member

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    Peat bogs are libraries from which we have yet to read most of the books. When they get drained (as people often do) the library burns down. OK, you need to grow $$ plants there, please extract cores first and store them well, so somebody can read the books later.

    Some places with peat are getting drier, even without these direct activities. Rainfall patterns are changing. Setting aside the question of whether IR absorbing gases are the cause, those bogs still need to get cored and the cores conserved.

    Like the information stored in melting glaciers. We need not discuss whether Lonnie Thompson is doing a great job at this or otherwise. The point is to conserve samples of the information-bearing time series, before (in these cases) they turn into CO2 and non-solid water.

    Then they can contribute to improved scientific understanding. Knowledge of how things happening now resembled those that happened in the past.

    One might suppose that few or no things happening now (@400 ppm CO2) didn't happen in the past. I hope y'all are getting the general idea that bogs and glaciers dwindling now is not really consistent with that view.
     
  7. austingreen

    austingreen Senior Member

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    Certainly we can't unscramble the egg, but it is important to understand where things have gone wrong in the past to make sure we don't continue to make the same mistakes. Nothing I wrote was ad hominem, it was supporting that LIA and MWP still have features that should be understood, and not swept under the rug, because they make the science more complicated.
    We definitely have more satellite information that can help confirm or deny hypotheses. Ice cores blur or avarge older information, but we definitely have pulled them for the MWP and LIA time periods.

    Sea levels have been much higher in the last two interglacials. It is hubris to think anything man could do now would stop the seas from rising.
    absolutely, especially when the argument in favor of making the lia and wwp reagonal was simply a lack of proxies, it helps us reject that hypothesis.

    Definitely no amount of palo reconstructions will tell us where we are going. The data is simply not there. What the palo can help us define is what is natural variation, and what is left and most likely caused by ghg.
     
    #7 austingreen, Nov 24, 2014
    Last edited: Nov 24, 2014
    bwilson4web likes this.