“If we think about the future in terms of the past, where we are going is uncharted territory for human society,” says the study’s lead author, Kevin Burke, a graduate student in the lab of paleoecologist John “Jack” Williams, professor of geography at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “We are moving toward very dramatic changes over an extremely rapid time frame, reversing a planetary cooling trend in a matter of centuries.”
All of the species on Earth today had an ancestor that survived the Eocene and the Pliocene, but whether humans and the flora and fauna we are familiar with can adapt to these rapid changes remains to be seen. The accelerated rate of change appears to be faster than anything life on the planet has experienced before....
During the Eocene, Earth’s continents were packed more closely together and global temperatures averaged 13 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. Dinosaurs had recently gone extinct and the first mammals, like ancestral whales and horses, were spreading across the globe. The Arctic was occupied by swampy forests like those found today in the southern U.S....
“We’ve seen big things happen in Earth’s history — new species evolved, life persists and species survive. But many species will be lost, and we live on this planet,” says Williams. “These are things to be concerned about, so this work points us to how we can use our history and Earth’s history to understand changes today and how we can best adapt.”
December 12, 2018
The University of Wisconsin announces a new study indicating that "humans are reversing a long-term cooling trend tracing back at least 50 million years."
Announcement here.
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Bull shit, it's getting colder not warmer.
It's the hockey stick. Everything old comes back.
Historical records of skirt lengths is probably the way to go. Let the fashion industry experts be heard from.
I'm doing my best to evolve as fast as I can but it doesn't seem to be working.
What does this mean for academic funding, is the question.
Thirteen degrees warmer than today?
I wonder how we ever cooled down from that, with all that carbon (cheers, John Henry!) in the atmosphere.
Here's what we're up against:
My unhappy life as a climate heretic
As I have said here before, our descendants will thank us for heading off the next advance of the glaciers.
How much did U of W get in their rice bowl for this study? Follow the money.
If you look at the revised hockey stick, and take it at face value, we should be thanking the Brits for starting the Industrial Revolution by burning coal and heading off an ice age that might well be underway right now, especially with the sun possibly going into a minimum.
“We are moving toward very dramatic changes over an extremely rapid time frame, reversing a planetary cooling trend in a matter of centuries.”
Grad student tells us that dramatic and rapid changes are happening. Crisis! More research money needed. Now!
We can't really tell after adjustment whether it's warming or cooling, but it's doing it really fast.
“These are things to be concerned about, so this work points us to how we can use our history and Earth’s history to understand changes today and how we can best adapt.”
That much is all well and good. So let’s have a look:
Future climate analogs for the years 2020, 2050, 2100 and 2200 according to three well-established models.
“Well established” seems to equal “According to our groupthink” Notice that it doesn’t say “according to models that have successfully predicted conditions up to now.”
More bilge from people who think that running computer models. equals science. Naomi Oreskes, of all people, wrote a great paper explaining why this is complete bunkum a long time ago. The same Naomi Oreskes of “97% consenus” and “Merchants of Doubt” fame, so you can’t say she’s a denier, and the study has a ton of cites:
Verification and validation of numerical models of natural systems is impossible. This is because natural systems are never closed and because model results are always nonunique. Models can be confirmed by the demonstration of agreement between observation and prediction, but confirmation is inherently partial. Complete confirmation is logically precluded by the fallacy of affirming the consequent and by incomplete access to natural phenomena. Models can only be evaluated in relative terms, and their predictive value is always open to question. The primary value of models is heuristic. - Oreskes
http://www.likbez.com/AV/CS/Pre01-oreskes.pdf
"Finally, we must admit that a model may confirm our biases and support incorrect intuitions.” - Oreskes.
Wait a minute! Does this mean that just because a model is “well-established” that that doesn’t mean that the model is a good approximation of reality? Why yes it does.
I keep hoping to see some new science in these articles that provides real support for the claims. I keep seeing that they just ran more “experiments” on their groupthink models. Sigh...
If only it were true. It isn't, of course, we haven't even reversed the cooling trend of the current interglacial. The trick phrase is "rate". You know, if you drive over a bumpy road, some times you go up at high rates, but that doesn't mean you gain a lot of altitude. And the "unprecedented" rate is controversial, with similar rates in the past. The current campaign of climate hysteria reminds me more of political talking points than science. It is sad, especially for WI that once had a good reputation in the area.
If we think about the future in terms of the past, where we are going is uncharted territory for human society...
I'm of the opinion, amazingly, that the future is always and has always been "uncharted territory."
So, this is a null statement.
which compared future climate projections to historical climate data from the early 20th century. The new study relies on extensive data about climate conditions to probe much deeper in Earth’s geologic past and expand those comparisons.
So I wonder if these guys ever read abut “back test overfitting”? What’s the point? Why put the groupthink at risk. Of course this same historical climate data is constantly massaged and changed to suss out warming trends that certainly must exist because all of the climate models say it does.
While not without their flaws, each of these models represents the best available data and state-of-the-art techniques.
So once again, he vouches for the models not on their performance, but on their conformity with everybody’s assumptions.
In the roughly 20 to 25 years I have been working in the field, we have gone from expecting climate change to happen, to detecting the effects, and now, we are seeing that it’s causing harm. People are dying, property is being damaged, we’re seeing intensified fires and intensified storms that can be attributed to climate change.
That’s quite a claim that I notice is unsupported by any cites and doesn’t actually line up with anything I have read anywhere. I guess I have to go to Google Scholar.
The current "ice age" began ~4 million years ago - about the time the gap between North and South America closed - not 50.
Wow! The Great Warming Con is flipping to another excuse for the sudden Global Cooling just when the had guaranteed warming from meaningless CO2 trace amounts.Now they say Climate History was always cooling. No mention of the sudden stop in Sun Spots causing cooling since 1997. The Fake Science guys are totally busted.
So what do we have on of the “intensified storms” that the author declares are happening? Let’s go to Nature
Whether the characteristics of tropical cyclones have changed or will change in a warming climate — and if so, how — has been the subject of considerable investigation, often with conflicting results. Large amplitude fluctuations in the frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones greatly complicate both the detection of long-term trends and their attribution to rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Trend detection is further impeded by substantial limitations in the availability and quality of global historical records of tropical cyclones. Therefore, it remains uncertain whether past changes in tropical cyclone activity have exceeded the variability expected from natural causes. However, future projections based on theory and high-resolution dynamical models consistently indicate that greenhouse warming will cause the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms
https://www.nature.com/articles/ngeo779
It’s almost as if it’s that if they didn’t have their precious groupthink codified in climate models, they would know nothing at all about the climate. Bullshit about hurricanes is what converted Judith Curry, who was a member of the “consensus” and a leading expert on tropical cyclones to a skeptic. That and that ClimateAudit had clearly nailed Mann and his Hockey Stick on some fundamental errors. One statistic on tropical cyclones that we have that goes back a couple of centuries, Landfalling US Hurricanes, shows zero trend.
I wish somebody on the warming side could discuss this cogently, but I have never seen that in all my years of on line discussions of this issue. I have yet to see the warmie that can go beyond asserting that “Everything I read in the media says it’s true!"
"humans are reversing a long-term cooling trend tracing back at least 50 million years."
One can only Hope that this is the case, May GOD, and man's precious CO2 prevent (or at least slow down) the resumption of this Ice Age
Let’s look further at his claim that "People are dying, property is being damaged, we’re seeing intensified fires and intensified storms that can be attributed to climate change."
However, with one exception over a more limited domain, no other study has attempted to formally attribute these changes to anthropogenic increases of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Using the observations together with a set of global climate model simulations ...
Well, let’s keep reading the abstract.
Furthermore, the nonnatural parts of these changes can be attributed confidently to climate changes induced by anthropogenic greenhouse gases, aerosols, ozone, and land use. The signal from the Columbia dominates the analysis, and it is the only basin that showed a detectable signal when the analysis was performed on individual basins. It should be noted that although climate change is an important signal, other climatic processes have also contributed to the hydrologic variability of large basins in the western United States.
https://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/2009JCLI2470.1
Yeesh!
Any of you warmies able to cite any attribution studies that derive their “confidence” from anything other than a bigger set of balls to make the claims.
The reason nobody teaches critical thinking anymore is that shit like this would get laughed off the stage by people who looked at these claims carefully.
It is sad academics don't teach thermodynamics these days.
All I know is Western Montana hasn't had an awesomely cold winter since the 80s. Like below zero for the whole month of February.
How we supposed to keep out the riffraff.
The complete lack of sunspots called and would like to have a word with these folks.
As heat from the core of the earth dissipates, and species continue to go extinct from falling temperatures, urgent measures are needed to reverse the trend.
The science is settled.
These articles are going to seem ridiculous ten years from now when we are worrying about ways to warm a cooling Earth.
“During the Eocene, Earth’s continents were packed more closely together and global temperatures averaged 13 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today.”
According to NASA, the global temperature averages 58.3 degrees Fahrenheit (14.6 degrees Celsius), Thirteen degrees C. warmer would mean an average global temperature of 81 degrees F. That's warm!
How does this square with the the Little Ice Age? Somehow the Earth cooled so fast after the Medieval Warm Period that the river Thames froze over in London. All the grapevines in Britain died. Then the Earth steadily warmed in the pre-industrial age, and the oceans resumed their steady rise, which has not varied in recorded history. Not at all.
By the way, where are all the cities Al Gore said would be underwater by 2013? Here we are five years after his predicted date and we are "high and dry" still. What gives, Al?
Speaking of long-term trends, I've been thinking about CO2 levels lately and I've been getting a bit worried. It's not a personal anxiety, but rather a kind of dismay about the odds against life existing.
Here's the issue in a nutshell: what is the minimum level of CO2 in the atmosphere that land plants need to survive?
What triggered this worry was my realization that life in the ocean (or certain kinds of life) is continuously sucking CO2 out of the biosphere and burying it in the form of limestone and other carbonate rocks. It's a slow process but there are huge beds of carbonate minerals being formed even now. So one question is, how fast on average is CO2 being removed from the biosphere?
The next question is what in the world is restoring it? (I mean ignoring our miraculous intervention.) Is it volcanos? Is it subducting oceanic plate, where the buried carbonate is turned into CO2 as pressure and temperature increase, and is then returned to the biosphere via eruption?
The proxy record of CO2 levels suggests that from a geologic perspective CO2 levels have been just been getting lower and lower. And from biology we can guess that there might already have been whole groups of plants that have gone extinct primarily because CO2 has dropped to low for them.
By the way has anyone done the experiment of putting plants in a low CO2 atmosphere and seeing what happens? At what level do plants cease to grow? At what level do they die?
I just did a google search on "low CO2 plant extinction" and found this:
http://www.adividedworld.com/scientific-issues/co2-levels-in-air-dangerously-low-for-life-on-earth/
Which is in the general direction but not quite the question I'm asking. An interesting quote from it:
From this plot you can see that approximately 540 million years ago, carbon dioxide in the air peaked at almost 7,000 parts per million! Given current hysteria over the paltry 400 ppm we presently have, these kinds of enormous CO2 concentrations must have caused tremendous atmospheric heating and been extremely detrimental to life at the time — Right?
Yet average temperatures at the time were only about 22°C (71.6°F), approximately 8°C above our current global average of around 14°C (57.2°F).
And then there are some graphs showing the effects of elevated CO2 on plant growth. It should be no surprise that increasing CO2 dramatically increases the rate at which plants grow. But what alarms me is the other direction, the cliff-edge towards lower growth as CO2 levels are dropped.
Could it be that we just accidently extended the duration of life on land by another hundred million years or so?
Humans were cooler 50 million years ago because they were fun-loving monkeys back then.
From: notrickszone.com/2013/05/17/atmospheric-co2-concentrations-at-400-ppm-are-still-dangerously-low-for-life-on-earth/
"Below 150 ppm, plant-life dies off on a massive scale. The Earth actually came very close to that point many times over the last 2 million years during the ice ages. At the bottom of the last ice age just 20,000 years ago, life on the planet literally teetered on the brink when CO2 fell to a level of just 180 ppm. Do we really want to live on the brink of extinction?"
And: "Note that at high CO2 concentrations, such as 800 ppm, plants thrive. But as CO2 levels fall off, growth rates really start to plummet once they fall below 500 ppm. History shows that the Earth sustains much more life, i.e. is much greener and fruitful, when CO2 levels are higher, i.e. in the vicinity of 1000 ppm."
We are currently at 400 ppm.
“If we think about the future in terms of the past, where we are going is uncharted territory for human society,”
Take climate out of it, and that statement remains true.
Humans pretty much went off the charted future when they invented slash and burn agriculture.
Geography professor?
@JMS: Points off for math failure.
Increased CO2 aids plant growth, yes. Plants need more than CO2 to thrive.
A 50 million year cooling trend, huh? Well, yes, I guess you can find a time 50 million years ago when it was warmer. Thirteen *thousand* years ago (a blink of the geologic eye) there would have been several thousand feet of ice over my Whidbey Island home in Puget Sound. The endpoint of the time interval you choose makes a lot of difference.
By the way, all that ice disappeared over a period of only one or two thousand years. So all the alarm about today's "rate of warming" seems like so much hooey to me.
Lyle Smith says: "Geography professor?"
Well, yes. A lot of the climate studies people are housed in Geography departments -- it's a particular emphasis of that department here at my university. And the faculty here (I know them well) are very reasonable and do some excellent work. There's very legitimate stuff to be done in studying impacts of a changing climate on natural and human-made systems. It's the headline-grabbing sensationalists that cause the grief.
Sadly our current CO2 concentration of 400 ppm is not going to persist. It's just a blip and we will probably be back to something like 250 ppm in just a few hundred years. The reason it's just a blip is that for one reason or another we are going to stop burning coal and natural gas and thus stop emitting large amounts of CO2, and shortly thereafter CO2 levels will rapidly drop as the CO2 in the atmosphere will reach equilibrium with the CO2 in oceans and then almost all of the CO2 we have added will have ended up in the oceans.
So this study, funded by the National Science Foundation, is an improbable fantasy, because there is just no way that a brief (less than two hundred years) blip of increased CO2 is going to move us anywhere near these climates of earlier eras and that is true even if we assume the current climate models are accurate in assigning CO2 levels such a prominent role in setting global temperature and ignore the increasing evidence that CO2 levels might be a minor factor.
"and we will probably be back to something like 250 ppm in just a few hundred years."
So, do I keep the Carhartt?
Bovine Scatology.
A model is a hypothesis, not evidence, which can provide guidance for forecasts, not predictions. That said, science is a near-frame philosophy motivated by the understanding that accuracy is inversely proportional to the product of time and space offsets from an established frame of reference, and a framework that attempts to enforce that limited perspective and expectation.
I just love how the future is somehow surprisingly "uncharted territory". I mean, when was the future ever not so?
Blogger jaydub said..."The attached You tube presentation by Steve Goreham is one of the best AGW take downs I have seen. It's about 40 minutes long but definitely worth the time."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mtHreJbr2WM
Thanks for that, jaydub. Enjoyed it. I've seem much of that before, but his presentation was first rate.
I'd love to watch a similar-level "Yes, global warming is real" presentation but I don't know where to find one. Perhaps somebody (MadisonMan?) could provide a link?
> The reason it's just a blip is that for one reason or another we are going to stop burning coal and natural gas and thus stop emitting large amounts of CO2
I imagine enormous fusion plants dedicated to breaking down carbonate rock and recycling the CO2. Or perhaps giant greenhouses during the next ice age with raised CO2 levels. When the ice comes, nations will die. Be thankful that you won't be there.
"global temperatures averaged 13 degrees Celsius warmer than they are today"
So actually we are moving into charted territory?
Anyway, as soon as an alarmist tells us what the best climate is, and why, I'll pay attention.
rhhardin said...
We can't really tell after adjustment whether it's warming or cooling, but it's doing it really fast.
"I don't know where I am or where I'm going, but I'm making really good time!"
NOTE: Fifth attempt to post this message. "Sorry about the inconvenience" my ass. Now, I'm just being stubborn.
FWIW Summers here in Las Vegas the TV weather shows the daily temperature, the record high for the day, and the year in which it occurred. Typically this is in the 1930's or 1940's. Of course, the temperature is measured in a different spot than it was back then, but still.
Humans and Eocene are not comparable in time or scale. A lot happened over those tens of millions of years. Humans have been around for a wink of time.
"How much did U of W get in their rice bowl for this study?"
"The study was funded by the National Science Foundation (DEB-1353896) and the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation."
Awarded Amount to Date: $733,042.00
That's from the feds. Don't know about the alums.
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