Will Al Gore Melt?

ViRedd · Feb 3, 2007

I'll have no problem looking into the eyes of my grandkids while saying: "You know kids, everytime I hear the Chicken Littles of the world trying to scare us into becoming a third-world country, weither using the "Coming Ice Age," or "Global Warming," as a prop, I'll always call a spade a spade, and bullshit, bullshit. There is NO scientific evidence proving that Mankind is causing global warming.

Vi

medicineman · Feb 3, 2007

ViRedd said:
I'll have no problem looking into the eyes of my grandkids while saying: "You know kids, everytime I hear the Chicken Littles of the world trying to scare us into becoming a third-world country, weither using the "Coming Ice Age," or "Global Warming," as a prop, I'll always call a spade a spade, and bullshit, bullshit. There is NO scientific evidence proving that Mankind is causing global warming.

Vi

Your grandkids might have a different take on it!

ViRedd · Feb 3, 2007

The proof, Med ... show me the proof.

Vi

PS: By the way, there is a movement in Canada to remove themselves from the Kyoto Treaty.

medicineman · Feb 3, 2007

Just to show that I didn't pull this out of my ass:Ian Sample, science correspondent
Friday February 2, 2007

Guardian

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world's largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Travel expenses and additional payments were also offered.

The UN report was written by international experts and is widely regarded as the most comprehensive review yet of climate change science. It will underpin international negotiations on new emissions targets to succeed the Kyoto agreement, the first phase of which expires in 2012. World governments were given a draft last year and invited to comment.

The AEI has received more than $1.6m from ExxonMobil and more than 20 of its staff have worked as consultants to the Bush administration. Lee Raymond, a former head of ExxonMobil, is the vice-chairman of AEI's board of trustees.

The letters, sent to scientists in Britain, the US and elsewhere, attack the UN's panel as "resistant to reasonable criticism and dissent and prone to summary conclusions that are poorly supported by the analytical work" and ask for essays that "thoughtfully explore the limitations of climate model outputs".

Climate scientists described the move yesterday as an attempt to cast doubt over the "overwhelming scientific evidence" on global warming. "It's a desperate attempt by an organisation who wants to distort science for their own political aims," said David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia.

Guardian | Scientists offered cash to dispute climate study

Wavels · Feb 4, 2007

lol
The big question remains...where is the desire to debate.....hmmmm?
Steyn nails it here.....

February 4, 2007
BY MARK STEYN Sun-Times Columnist
From the "Environmental News Network": "Science Is Solid on Climate Change, Congress Told." "The science is solid," says Louise Frechette, deputy secretary-general of the United Nations. "The science is solid," says Sen. Dianne Feinstein.
"The science is really solid," says TV meteorologist Heidi Cullen. "The science is very solid."
And at that point, on "Larry King Live" last week, Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at MIT, remarked: "Heidi says the science is solid and I can't criticize her because she never says what science she's talking about."
Indeed. If the science is so solid, maybe they could drag it out to the Arctic for the poor polar bears to live on now that the ice is melting faster than a coed's heart at an Al Gore lecture.
Alas, the science isn't so solid. In the '70s, it was predicting a new ice age. Then it switched to global warming. Now it prefers "climate change." If it's hot, that's a sign of "climate change." If it's cold, that's a sign of "climate change." If it's 53 with sunny periods and light showers, you need to grab an overnight bag and get outta there right now because "climate change" is accelerating out of control.
The silliest argument is the anecdotal one: "You only have to look outside your window to see that climate change is happening." Outside my window in northern New England last week, it was minus 20 Fahrenheit. Very cold. Must be the old climate change kicking in, right? After all, December was very mild. Which was itself a sign of climate change. A few years ago, the little old lady who served as my town's historian for many decades combed over the farmers' diaries from two centuries ago that various neighbors had donated to her: From the daily records of 15 Januarys, she concluded that three were what we'd now regard as classic New Hampshire winters, ideal for lumbering or winter sports; eight had January thaws, and four had no snow at all. This was in the pre-industrial 18th century.
Today, faced with eight thaws and four entirely snowless Januarys, we'd all be running around shrieking that the great Gaia is displeased. Wake up and smell the CO2, people! We need to toss another virgin into the volcano. A virgin SUV, that is. Brand-new model, straight off the assembly line, cupholders never been used. And as the upholstery howls in agony, we natives will stand around chanting along with High Priestess Natalie Cole's classic recording: ''Unsustainable, that's what you are.''
As we say in the north country, if you don't like the weather, wait five minutes. And if you don't like the global weather, wait three decades. For the last century or so, the planet has gone through very teensy-weensy warming trends followed by very teensy-weensy cooling trends followed by very teensy-weensy warming trends, every 30 years or so. And, even when we're in a pattern of "global warming" or "global cooling," the phenomenon is not universally observed -- i.e., it's not "global," or even very local. In the Antarctic, the small Palmer peninsula has got a little warmer but the main continent is colder. Up north, the western Arctic's a little warmer but the eastern Arctic's colder. So, if you're an eastern polar bear, you're in clover -- metaphorically, I hasten to add. If you're a western polar bear, you'll be in clover literally in a year or two, according to Al Gore.
And, if you really don't like the global weather, wait half-a-millennium. A thousand years ago, the Arctic was warmer than it is now. Circa 982, Erik the Red and a bunch of other Vikings landed in Greenland and thought, "Wow! This land really is green! Who knew?" So they started farming it, and were living it up for a couple of centuries. Then the Little Ice Age showed up, and they all died. A terrible warning to us all about "unsustainable development": If a few hundred Vikings doing a little light hunter-gathering can totally unbalance the environment, imagine the havoc John Edwards' new house must be wreaking.
The question is whether what's happening now is just the natural give and take of the planet, as Erik the Red and my town's early settlers understood it. Or whether it's something so unprecedented that we need to divert vast resources to a transnational elite bureaucracy so that they can do their best to cripple the global economy and deny much of the developing world access to the healthier and longer lives that capitalism brings. To the eco-chondriacs that's a no-brainer. As Mark Fenn of the Worldwide Fund for Nature says in the new documentary ''Mine Your Own Business'':
''In Madagascar, the indicators of quality of life are not housing. They're not nutrition, specifically. They're not health in a lot of cases. It's not education. A lot of children in Fort Dauphin do not go to school because the parents don't consider that to be important. . . . People have no jobs, but if I could put you with a family and you could count how many times in a day that that family smiles. Then I put you with a family well off, in New York or London, and you count how many times people smile. . . . You tell me who is rich and who is poor."
Well, if smiles are the measure of quality of life, I'm Bill Gates; I'm laughing my head off. Male life expectancy in Madagascar is 52.5 years. But Mark Fenn is right: Those l'il malnourished villagers sure look awful cute dancing up and down when the big environmentalist activist flies in to shoot the fund-raising video.
If "global warming" is real and if man is responsible, why then do so many "experts" need to rely on obviously fraudulent data? The famous "hockey stick" graph showed the planet's climate history as basically one long bungalow with the Empire State Building tacked on the end. Completely false. In evaluating industrial impact, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used GDP estimates based on exchange rates rather than purchasing power: As a result, they assume by the year 2100 that not only South Africans but also North Koreans will have a higher per capita income than Americans. That's why the climate-change computer models look scary. That's how "solid" the science is: It's predicated on the North Korean economy overtaking the United States.
Could happen. Who knows?
But that's the point: Who knows? You could take every dime spent by every government and NGO and eco-group to investigate "climate change" and spend it on Internet porn instead, and it wouldn't make the slightest difference to what the climate will be in 2050.
However, it would make a dramatic difference to the lifestyle of the "climate change" jet set. Which is why, even before latest new IPCC doomsday scenario was released, the Associated Press was running stories like: "New Climate Report Too Rosy, Experts Say." The AP's "science writer" warns that even this "dire report" is the "sugarcoated version." It's insufficiently hysterical, in every sense.
© Mark Steyn 2007
CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Mark Steyn :: What's so hot about fickle science?

medicineman · Feb 4, 2007

You could take every dime spent by every government and NGO and eco-group to investigate "climate change" and spend it on Internet porn instead, and it wouldn't make the slightest difference to what the climate will be in 2050.
Brilliant, lets all just watch porn and let the smog pile up relentlessly. If you've ever spent a little time in Los angeles when the wind isn't blowing and you cant smell the crap in the air, then you're not human. Go ahead and stick your head in the sand, It's your grandkids that will pay for your foolishness.People like Vi that live up the coast of CA. where the ocean breezes keep the air clean cant relate, but if you spent some time in any big city, you'd know the problem. I think people that think like you guys ought to be made to live in watts for a couple of years, then you'd change your empty minds!

ViRedd · Feb 4, 2007

Sorry Med, but your Los Angeles example wont carry water for ya. I grew up in downtown L.A. I'll tell you this with a straight face ... The air quality now, is far, far better than it was when I was a kid back in the 1950s and 60s.

Vi

medicineman · Feb 4, 2007

ViRedd said:
Sorry Med, but your Los Angeles example wont carry water for ya. I grew up in downtown L.A. I'll tell you this with a straight face ... The air quality now, is far, far better than it was when I was a kid back in the 1950s and 60s.

Vi

Yeah, they've lowered the NOX emissions, so the stuff that is poisenous is still there but you just can't see it. Hey Wadnuts, I was a smog technician in LA for ten years, I know my smog. The stuff they're breathing now is extremely poisenous, it's just invisible. It was the Oxides of Nitrogen that created the unsightly goo, the catalitic convertor and the EGR valve cleaned that up, but the sulphur, the hydrocarbons, the CO (Carbon Monoxide) are still hanging out. In fact the sulphur level is way up, ever heard of acid rain? So breath deep dork, there's no need to worry, man isn't polluting the planet one bit, right, Ha Ha Ha, you guys are hillarious. You should see what is in diesel emissions, horrific. Next time you get behind a bus, breath deep, knowing the stuff is "harmless", it shouldn't bother you at all!

7xstall · Feb 5, 2007

climatology is a new science and we might think a lot of ourselves with all our fancy technology but if they can't get the weather forecast right two days in a row how can they predict the end of the world?

look in the middle med, that's where the truth is.

you know for a fact if you studied hydrocarbons at all that we are burning them much more efficiently today than we were 20 years ago. fuel injection, air intake sensors, combustion pressure...it's not like we're dumping gas into a carb anymore...most of us anyway.

medicineman · Feb 5, 2007

7xstall said:
climatology is a new science and we might think a lot of ourselves with all our fancy technology but if they can't get the weather forecast right two days in a row how can they predict the end of the world?

look in the middle med, that's where the truth is.

you know for a fact if you studied hydrocarbons at all that we are burning them much more efficiently today than we were 20 years ago. fuel injection, air intake sensors, combustion pressure...it's not like we're dumping gas into a carb anymore...most of us anyway.

The simple fact that the world of automobiles has doubled in the last ten years has nothing to do with it eh. Blaming me for a 1/4 mile blast for pollution is A funny line, yeah like I drive a 1/4 mile and you drive, how much? get real Humans are contributing to global warming and only 19th century science is bullshitting us differently. What part of the country do you live in?

7xstall · Feb 5, 2007

sure, we make a lot of pollution and we need to cut it back even more, nukes for example. we need to live cleaner, that's all there is to it. communist countries are the worst but as the lust for power and money taints their leadership they do nothing.

i don't know if we are really changing the climate or if we just got the tools to actually notice the climate and it's changing on its own like it always has. there are fine scientists on both sides of the issue.

what's the high temp in two weeks med? when you can tell me that and get it right your science is going in the right direction.

Dankdude · Feb 5, 2007

Med you have a core assumption that Man has ultimate power over all things.
This just isn't so. Environmentalist overemphasize mans importance
Most envorinmental scientist use computer models to make their assumptions as to why things are happening.
If you know anything about computers and programming, then you would know there is no perfect computer or program, one line of code written impropperly can change everything in a program.
Thus the science is flawed.
Look at the last hurricane season.
How many different computer models were wrong?
How many computer models showed different storm tracs?
It boils down to lines of code written in visual basic as to what the outcome is. This has no baring on Nature.

Dankdude · Feb 5, 2007

Introduction

Is the Earth currently experiencing a warming trend? Yes.

Are human activities, including the burning of fossil fuel and forest conversion, the primary — or even significant — drivers of this current temperature trend? The scientifically appropriate answer — cautious and conforming to the known facts — is: probably not.

Indeed, the current warming cycle is not unusual: Evidence from around the world shows that the Earth has experienced numerous climate cycles throughout its history. These cycles include glacial periods (more commonly known as Ice Ages) and interglacial periods, as well as smaller, though significant, fluctuations. During the past 20 years, scientists have been accumulating strong physical evidence that the Earth consistently goes through a climate cycle marked by alternating warmer and cooler periods over 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years). The evidence indicates that:
1. The Earth experienced a Little Ice Age from 1300 to 1850.
2.A Modern Warming period began about 1850 and continues to the present.

We have long had physical evidence that the Earth has experienced numerous climate cycles throughout its history. The best-known of these is the Ice Age cycle, with 90,000-year Ice Ages interspersed with far shorter interglacial periods. What is new is the evidence of more moderate, persistent climate cycles within these broader cycles.

The message that the 1,500-year climate cycle is real, broad — and sudden — is being dug up from the Earth itself by modern science. The key evidence comes from very long-term proxies for temperature change, especially ice cores, seabed and lake sediments, and fossils of pollen grains and tiny sea creatures that document even small changes in Earth’s temperature over many thousands of years.

In addition, we have a number of shorter-term proxies (cave stalagmites, tree rings from trees both living and buried, boreholes and a wide variety of other temperature proxies) that testify to the global nature of the 1,500-year climate cycles.

A striking example of the effect of this 1,500-year climate cycle can be seen in the temperature-sensitive history of wine-growing in England.

Dankdude · Feb 5, 2007

The Romans grew wine grapes in England when they occupied it from the first through the fourth centuries. Aerial photography, remote sensing and large-scale excavation have recently revealed seven Roman-era vineyards in south central England. One site contains nearly four miles of bedding trenches that could have supported some 4,000 grapevines.1

A thousand years later, during the Medieval Warming of 950-1300, the Britons themselves grew wine grapes in England. The Domesday Book, compiled in the 11th century, recorded 46 places in southern England growing wine grapes. (Richard Tkachuck of the Geosciences Research Institute notes that German vineyards were found as high as 780 meters in elevation during the Medieval Warming, but are found today up to only 560 meters — indicating a temperature difference of 1° to 1.4° C.2) During the Little Ice Age (1300-1850), England was too cold to grow wine grapes. Instead, London often held ice festivals on the frozen Thames River, which hasn’t frozen in the last 150 years.

Now that the Little Ice Age has given way to the Modern Warming, a few hardy Britons have again begun serious efforts to grow good wine grapes in England — but thus far with spotty success. The Web site The English Wine website admits that British wine-making is still a very chancy proposition. Only two years in 10 will the wine be very good, and during four of the other years it will be terrible, “largely due to weather....”

British vintners should be hopeful, however. The Modern Warming is still young, and likely to eventually give them several centuries of good wine production. The Earth is apparently having its third natural, moderate — and unstoppable — warming in 2,000 years.

Taken by itself, the cycle of wine-grape growing in England might be seen as an aberration. However, this is just one bit of the emerging body of physical evidence of a natural climate cycle — a cycle too moderate and too long to have been reported in the Viking sagas and earlier oral histories from people without thermometers.

None of these pieces of evidence would be convincing in and of themselves. However, in order to dismiss the huge impact of the 1500-year climate cycle, we would have to dismiss not only the human histories from those periods, but also the enormous range and variety of physical evidence presented here.

Importantly, if the current warming trend is, as the evidence suggests, part of an entirely natural climate cycle, actions proposed to prevent further warming would be futile and could, by imposing substantial costs upon the global economy, lessen the ability of people to adapt to the impacts — both positive and negative — of climate change.

Dankdude · Feb 5, 2007

The Ice Cores

In the 1980s scientists got the first unequivocal evidence of a continuing, moderate natural climate cycle.The 1,500-year climate cycle emerged almost full-blown from Greenland in 1983.

Denmark’s Willi Dansgaard and Switzerland’s Hans Oeschger were among the first people in the world to see two mile-long ice cores that brought up 250,000 years of the Earth’s frozen, layered climate history. Over the previous dozen years, the two researchers had pioneered ways to pry information from the ice cores. They had learned, among other things, that the ratio of oxygen-18 isotopes to oxygen-16 isotopes in ice could reveal the air temperature at the time when the snowflakes that made the ice fell to earth. The correspondence of the change in the isotope ratios to the recent Medieval Warming Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) is shown in Figure II.

Dansgaard and Oeschger expected to see the big 90,000-year Ice Ages in the cores, and they did. But they were startled to find, superimposed on the big Ice Age swings, a smaller, moderate and more persistent temperature cycle. They estimated the average cycle length at 2,550 years. They dismissed volcanoes as a causal factor because there’s no such cycle in volcanic activity. The timing of the cycles seemed to match closely with the known history of recent glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe.

The report that Dansgaard and Oeschger wrote in 1984, “North Atlantic Climatic Oscillations Revealed by Deep Greenland Ice Cores,” was, in retrospect, almost eerie in its accuracy, its completeness and its logical linking of the climate cycles to the sun.4 The only major correction imposed by subsequent research is that the cycles were more frequent than they thought. The average length of the cycles has now been shortened by almost half — from their original estimate of 2,550 years to 1,500 years (plus or minus 500 years).

Dansgaard and Oeschger were correct when they told us that the climate shifts were moderate, rising and falling over a range of about 4° C in northern Greenland, with very little temperature change at the equator — and only half a degree when averaged over the northern hemisphere.

The cycles were confirmed by 1) their appearance in two different ice cores drilled more than 1,000 miles apart; 2) their correlation with known glacier advances and retreats in northern Europe; and 3) independent data in a seabed sediment core from the Atlantic Ocean west of Ireland.5

They noted that the cycle shifts were abrupt, sometimes gaining half of their eventual temperature change in a decade or so. That suggested an external forcing, perhaps amplified and transmitted globally by the ocean currents and winds. (In the mid-19th century, the Upper Fremont Glacier in Wyoming went from Little Ice Age to Modern Warming in about 10 years.6 That implies a climate driver from outside our planet, almost certainly involving the sun.)

However, Dansgaard and Oeschger noted, “Since the solar radiation is the only important input of energy to the climatic system, it is most obvious to seek an explanation in solar processes. Unfortunately we know much less about the solar radiation output than about the emission of solar particulate matter in the past.”

The two scientists did know, however, that both carbon-14 and beryllium-10 isotopes vary inversely with the strength of the solar activator. The isotopes of both elements in their Greenland ice cores showed historic temperature lows during what solar scientists term the Maunder sunspot minimum (1645–1715) — the absolute coldest point of the Little Ice Age and a period when sunspots virtually disappeared.

Dankdude · Feb 5, 2007

Today, we can measure variations in the sun’s irradiance from satellites out beyond the obscuring atmosphere of our own planet. The solar constant isn’t — constant, that is. We also know that when the sun is less active, its solar wind weakens and provides less shielding for the Earth from the cosmic rays that bounce around space. With a weaker sun, more of the cosmic rays hit the Earth, creating more charged particles in the atmosphere, which then become low, wet clouds reflecting more heat back into space. A less active sun thus means a cooler Earth.7

The importance of the 1,500-year cycles found in the Greenland ice cores increased dramatically four years later when they were also found at the other end of the world — in an ice core from the Antarctic’s Vostok Glacier. The Vostok ice core went back 400,000 years, and showed the 1,500-year cycle through its whole length.8

The scientific world had known about the sunspot connection to Earth’s climate for some 400 years. British astronomer William Herschel claimed in 1801 that he could forecast wheat prices by sunspot numbers, because wheat crops were often poor when sunspots (and thus solar activity) were low. Not only did the Maunder minimum (1645-1715) coincide with the coldest period of the Little Ice Age, the Sporer minimum (1450–1543) aligned with the second-coldest phase of that period.

In 1991, Eigel Friis-Christensen and Knud Lassen noted that the correlation between solar activity and Earth temperatures is even stronger if we use the length of the solar cycle to represent the sun’s variations instead of the number of sunspots.9 (The solar cycles average about 11 years in length, but actually vary between eight and 14 years.) Their paper in Science concluded that the solar connection explained 75 to 85 percent of recent climate variation.

medicineman · Feb 5, 2007

7xstall said:
sure, we make a lot of pollution and we need to cut it back even more, nukes for example. we need to live cleaner, that's all there is to it. communist countries are the worst but as the lust for power and money taints their leadership they do nothing.

i don't know if we are really changing the climate or if we just got the tools to actually notice the climate and it's changing on its own like it always has. there are fine scientists on both sides of the issue.

what's the high temp in two weeks med? when you can tell me that and get it right your science is going in the right direction.

Tell me why it is going to be in the 90s in LA in february! Tell me why there are killer tornados in central florida in January-february. tell me why there are killer hurricanes in the south East one year and none the next. Tell me why the ice caps and glaciers are melting at a rate not seen since recorded history. You wanna know why, global warming! You head in the sand folks can blame it on 1500 year cycles if you want, but it is still real. Maybe instead of sitting on your hands, you might try and figure out a way to reverse it. Maybe we'll have to give up some of the luxuries we enjoy, boy would that cause a stir among the soccer moms and all the stinking yuppies, spoiled little rich kids with nothing better to do than figure out how to consume more, yeah that would piss them off. "What, you mean I have to give up something to save life as we know it on the planet, Absured"!

Dankdude · Feb 5, 2007

Seabed Sediments

Let’s look now at another source that seems to confirm the 1,500-year climate cycle: seabed sediments.

Gerard Bond of Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory analyzed sediments on the floor of the southern North Atlantic. Roughly every 1,500 years, there was a surge in the amount of rocky debris picked up by the glaciers as they ground their way across eastern Canada and Greenland. This ice-rafted debris was then floated much farther south before the icebergs melted and it dropped to the sea floor. Both the increase in the volume of the debris and its floating much farther south indicated severe cold periods.

Bond found nine of these cycles in the last 12,000 years, and they matched those in the cores from the Greenland Ice Sheet and the Vostok Antarctic glacier — again strengthening our confidence that the cycles are real and significant.

Bond’s 1997 research report in Science10 begins:

“Evidence from North Atlantic deep-sea cores reveals that abrupt shifts punctuated what is conventionally thought to have been a relatively stable Holocene [interglacial] climate. During each of these episodes, cool, ice-bearing waters from north of Iceland were advected as far south as the latitude of Britain. At about the same times, the atmospheric circulation above Greenland changed abruptly. . . . Together, they make up a series of climatic shifts with a cyclicity close to 1,470 years (plus or minus 500 years). The Holocene events, therefore, appear to be the most recent manifestation of a pervasive millennial-scale climatic cycle operating independently of the glacial-interglacial climate state.” (emphasis added)

Bond thus points up the fact that the moderate 1,500-year cycle is powerful enough to periodically warm the Earth’s climate even when thousands of trillions of tons of ice are determined to keep it Ice-Age cold, and to periodically chill the planet even during warm interglacial periods.

The evidence for this moderate but persistent climate cycle has continued to mount around the world in recent decades.

Peter deMenocal’s team found African coastal seabed sediments documented a history of major changes in sea surface temperatures.11

Changes in plankton numbers and species gave the deMenocal team ocean temperature readings from the past, and the amounts of dust blown from Africa were an indicator of drought. These proxies tell us that when the sea surface temperatures fell off West Africa, much of the continent went drier for centuries. Then, the climate snapped back, quickly bringing such heavy rains that large lakes formed in the Sahara Desert. The most recent cooling in the region was a two-stage Little Ice Age between 1300 and 1850, essentially simultaneously with similar coolings in the Greenland ice cores, in the seabed sediments of the North Atlantic found by Bond, and in the reconstructed sea surface temperatures of the Sargasso Sea found by Lloyd Keigwin.12

Dankdude · Feb 5, 2007

Bond concluded that every 1,500 years, harsh cold periods drop North Atlantic ocean temperatures by 2 to 3.5° C. However, deMenocal says ocean temperatures off Africa simultaneously dropped even more sharply, with changes of 3 to 4° C.

Bond’s subsequent study demonstrated the linkage between the Earth’s warming-cooling cycle and the sun, using carbon-14 and beryllium-10 as proxies for solar warming and cooling.13

He wrote, “It is highly unlikely that Holocene climate forcing alone could have produced such large and abrupt production-rate changes at essentially the same time in both [the C-14 and Be-10]. Our correlations are evidence, therefore, that over the last 12,000 yearsvirtually every centennial time scale increase in drift ice documented in our North Atlantic records was tied to a distinct interval of . . . reduced solar output.

“A solar influence on climate of the magnitude and consistency implied by our evidence could not have been confined to the North Atlantic....”

Dating Back a Million Years. Near Iceland, Maureen Raymo of Boston College found the Earth was undergoing Dansgaard-Oeschger’s 1,500-year climate cycles more than a million years ago. Raymo and her research team retrieved a very long sediment core from the deep sea bottom south of Iceland. As the Raymo team wrote in Nature:

“Here we use sediment records of past iceberg discharge and deep-water chemistry to show that such millennial-scale oscillations in climate occurred over one million years ago.... Our results suggest that such climate instability may be a pervasive and long-term characteristic of Earth’s climate....”14

A Global Sampling of Sea Bed Cores. South of Iceland, Giancarlo Bianchi and Nicholas McCave studied a 1,500-year climate cycle that “may be related to an internal oscillation of the climate system.” The grain sizes of sediments carried by the Iceland-Scotland part of the “Atlantic ocean conveyor” reveal the strength of the current. Colder periods with less ice melt generate slower bottom currents that carried smaller sediment grains; warmer periods with stronger currents carried larger sediment grains. They found that flows changed with the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age, “and extend over the entire Holocene epoch with a quasi-periodicity of ~1500 years.”15 (emphasis added)

In the Norwegian Sea, Sweden’s Carin Andersson led a team which constructed a 3,000-year temperature history from the stable isotopes in the plankton and the number and types of protozoan skeletons from seabed sediment cores.16 The climate history shows a long cold period before the Roman Warming, then the Dark Ages, the Medieval Warming and the Little Ice Age.

A Baltic Sea sediment core shows a cold-weather period beginning about 1200, characterized by “a major decrease in the [algae cyst] assemblage and an increase in cold water [algae species].”17 The study also found the present Baltic is still too cold to support the subtropical marine species it had during the Medieval Warming.

Off Alaska, Old Dominion University’s Dennis Darby analyzed sediments from the continental shelf.18 The number and species of dinocysts (tiny ”cocoons” left behind by one-celled organisms) gives evidence of sea surface temperatures and sea-ice cover. The most surprising result of this study was the large variation in Arctic temperatures shown by the proxies — 6° C over the last 8,000 years, a greater range than on the Greenland Ice Sheet.

Dankdude · Feb 5, 2007

In the eastern Mediterranean, sediments accumulate rapidly and yield highly accurate seabed cores. Bettina Schilman from the Geological Survey of Israel used such proxies as oxygen-18 and carbon-13 isotopes in phytoplankton, titanium/aluminum ratios, iron/aluminum ratios, magnetic susceptibility, and color index to analyze past climates.19 She says abrupt climatic events occurred 270 years ago and 800 years ago that “probably correlate” with the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warming. She also notes corroborating evidence of the Medieval Warming in high Saharan lake levels,20, 21 and high levels in the Dead Sea,22, 23, 24, 25 and the Sea of Galilee,26, 27 as well as a precipitation maximum at the Nile headwaters.28, 29

In the Arabian Sea, west of Karachi, Pakistan, two seabed sediment cores date back nearly 5,000 years, and show “the 1,470-year cycle previously reported from the glacial-age Greenland ice record.” W. H. Berger and Ulrich von Rad suggested the cycles were tide-driven. However, they also note that “internal oscillations of the climate system cannot produce them.”30 (emphasis added)

Near the Philippines, the productivity of the phytoplankton is closely related to the strength of the winter monsoon. The production of phytoplankton was larger during glacial periods than during interglacial periods, but the researchers found that “the 1,500-year cycle...seems to be a pervasive feature of the monsoon climatic system.”31

Off the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, Boo-Keun Khim of Seoul University found the Little Ice Age and Medieval Warming, along with earlier warming/cooling cycles.32 Khim also notes that evidence of the Little Ice Age has been found in several other studies of Antarctic marine sediments, including Leventer and Dunbar, who reported on their study of algae microfossils at Antarctica’s McMurdo Sound in 1988.33

Will Al Gore Melt?

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