Climate Change or the End Time?

     I have decided to hurry up and write this blog now, given that the infallible Mayans predicted ages ago that the world would end this December 21.  

    An amazing article appeared in Reuters reporting the result of an opinion poll.  Apparently 40% of you out there believe that recent weather has worsened, and that this is the sign of the "End Times."  In other words, you think that God is going to destroy the world, and one of the things he has incorporated in his formula is bad weather.  And you are also sure that those who do not agree with you are in league with the devil. 

   Equally amazing, another 60% of you think that we are having exceptionally bad weather (such as the superstorm that hit the East Coast last month) and that it is due to man-made climate change.   This should not be confused with global warming (i.e., the well documented rise in global average temperature by 1 C since about 1900), but refers to disastrous weather like floods, hurricanes, earthquakes etc.   
     In other words, you basically agree with the religious right that the world is coming to an end, and that it is due to evil actions by humanity,  but you believe that there is a scientific explanation for the whole thing.  Pollution and especially carbon dioxide from fossil fuels is the culprit.   

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/13/us-usa-weather-religion-idUSBRE8BC1CX20121213

     Jeez, if you add it up that seems to come up to 100% who apparently believe that the weather is worsening to such an extent that global destruction is at hand.  It might not actually be 100% if some of you are being double counted (you believe God is getting ready to destroy the world, and fossil fuels are helping him to do it).  But it is clear that a very high percentage of normal average Americans believe that the world is coming to an end due to bad weather.  22% believe that it is within the next 50 years or so, and a significant fraction are genuinely worried that the world will end next week, in the supposed Mayan prophecy (there is no such prophecy, but far be it for the Village Elliot to spoil your fun). 

    The right believes that the Apocalypse is coming, and the left believes that fossil fuel consumption is destroying the world for reasons that do not involve God, but almost everyone agrees that the world is coming to an end, at least according to the opinion polls. The right believes that the left is wacky, and the left believes that the right is wacky, despite the fact that both sides are in basic agreement that the world is coming to an end due to weather related phenomena. 

    Apparently, most people believe that the world is coming to an end soon, but we may the opportunity to live a normal lifespan.  But according to Reuters, 22% of Americans (and 15% of people worldwide) think that the world will end in their lifetime. 

 http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/05/01/us-mayancalendar-poll-idUSBRE8400XH20120501

     The Village Elliot thinks you are all wacky, frankly.  I believe in God, and I also believe in the infrared absorption cross section of carbon dioxide, but I don't believe that the world is being destroyed by either one. 

    It may be that I am now in a tiny minority that does not believe in the imminent destruction of the earth due to weather (a more reasonable case can be made that humans will destroy the earth with nuclear weapons, but let's leave this possibility for a future blog).  

     It seems that there is simply a deep seated human need to believe in the end of the world. It used to be that Gaddaffi was the AntiChrist, or Saddam, or John Kennedy (not a Protestant, you see), or Hitler, or Kaiser Wilhelm or Napoleon.  My personal favorite was Ronald (6 letters) Wilson (6 letters) Reagan (6 letters).  Imagine the Antichrist posing as a Republican.  What a trickster he is!

    The Village Elliot thinks that before assuming that the world is being destroyed, we ought to let meteorologists  characterize current weather patterns and compare them to data from the past.  What a bland thought! I think they might say that the weather has in fact been worse in recent years, but overall the meteorlogical forecast is a little more optimistic than the death of the universe.

    Bad weather played a role in the last presidential election, as Mayor Bloomberg expressed his belief that President Obama would be more effective in changing the climate for the better than Mitt Romney.  Bloomberg believed that Hurricane Sandy was a consequence of bad environmental practices in the United States, although I'm not sure how he reached this conclusion.  I thought King Canute of England had already done this experiment when he commanded the sea to stop rising, and found that the sea would not listen.  But it is now a valid political perception, if not a scientific reality, that politicians are the key to saving the world from natural calamaties. 

 Reasonable people now believe that King Canute was actually right, and political action will improve the weather.  But the world will probably come to an end anyway, or so people say.  

     




 

The Medieval Warming Period and the Climate Stasis Hypothesis

 Did Eric the Red really colonize Greenland?  If so, was the weather warmer back then, or was it all a conspiracy?

    The historicity of the Medieval Warming Period is a minor controversy these days.  Almost everyone accepts the data from the 20th Century which shows that global average temperature has increased by about 1.0 degrees Celsius since about 1908.  By the same token, there is only a minor embarrassment that the temperature rise leveled off from about 1946 through 1975, and that once again the temperature rise has slowed since 2002.  This data is not in serious dispute, or at least it is not disputed by the Village Elliot. 

   Given that global temperatures have risen, the next question is whether human activity has been the primary cause.  Conventional wisdome is that human activity is absolutely implicated, based on the presumption that the average temperature of the earth has remained constant, plus or minus about 0.5 degrees Celsius, for thousands of years (referred to as the Climate Statis hypothesis; i.e., that climate change is definitely not natural or at least not on the timescale of "only" 100 years or so).  Hence a temperature rise of 1.0 degrees Celsius is too much to attribute to non-anthropogenic causes, and thus the CO2 Greenhouse Effect can safely be identified as the sole cause for the temperature rise.  Moreover, many mainstream climatologists argue that the world is headed for a climate catastrophe, and major changes are required in the global hydrocarbon economy in order to avert disaster.  

    The Village Elliot is not on board with some of these key principles, despite the fact that the persons making these assements are much better qualified and well studied in these matters.  In particular, I suggested in my last blog that historical climatology is basically blind as a bat if it could not see much unusual about 1816, the Year Without a Summer, in which snow fell year round.  It is thought that tree ring data provides information about the temperature in any given year, which I find amazing, given that on three continents trees reportedly failed to even grow rings that year because they stayed dormant.  The cooling of 1816 was caused by a massive volcanic eruption at Tambora, Indonesia and does not directly affect the CO2 Greenhouse hypothesis.  It does call into account whether the historical records of the 19th century are worth a darn, and specifically whether they allow us to rule out climate change caused by factors other than carbon dioxide.  

    Let us then turn our attention to the Medieval Warming period.  As is the case with the Year Without  a Summer, the Medieval Warming period used to be a historical fact.  Eric the Red colonized Greenland  at the end of the 10th century.  The Vikings flourished there, so that by the 13th century there were over 3000 colonists in 300 farms.   

Some historians have suggested that Eric named Greenland simply as a propaganda ploy to attract new residents.  Maybe so, but someone had to convince crops to grow in a short growing season, and people and livestock to not freeze to death once they did settle there.  These seem close to being historical facts which can not be easily overturned. 

Yet, according to conventional wisdom, global average temperatures changed only slightly during this period, and even the localized temperatures in the North Atlantic were cooler than they are today.

The Village Elliot wonders how this could be true.   Even with today's agricultural technology, it is very difficult to farm in Greenland.  To think that thousands of Vikings could be farming in a wintry wasteland does not make sense.  Morever,  Antactic Ice core data supports the notion that this period was indeed warmer than the later period.  This, plus the general dominance of the Vikings during those centuries, strongly implies that the temperatures were much warmer during that period.

Moreover, the Vikings were not the only group that settled Greenland.  It turns out that the aboriginal Tuniit and Inuits also greatly expanded their territory in Greenland coming from from the northwest, and thrived for a time before receding significantly during what historians can the Little Ice Age (but which most climatologists call a 0.5 degree temperature dip).     

Why it Matters

   The existence or nonexistence of the Medieval Warming period does not contradict the reality of the CO2 Greenhouse effect.   Rather, the reality of absorption of thermal energy by carbon dioxide is pretty much undisputed.   The advancement of the Climate Stasis hypothesis, or the notion that the climate never changed much prior to the 20th century. mainly serves to confuse the modelers and perhaps impart some errors into the assumptions that go into current climate models.  Namely, we may be left with a model of a robust terrestrial climate, which suggest that the earth's average temperature is not strongly affected of volcanos such as Tambora.  The models further suggest that the Year Without a Summer and the Medieval Warming Period never happened, or at least that they were greately exaggerated.  Hence this might lead to understimation of effects other than carbon dioxide.  Moreover, most climate historians seem content with the view that recent climate has been fairly static. 

   The Village Elliot, however, is a habitual contrarian.  Certainly I do not have the tools to prove or disprove the consensus views of professional climatologists.    Nevertheless, in my opinion--and it's just an opinion--future  more objective reviews of history will lead probably climatologists to conclude that there are indeed other factors worth worrying about in addition to  carbon dioxide.   From the standpoint of politics, however, this is a heretical prediction, as we've pretty much settled on a policy of reducing carbon emissions even if it retards economic growth.  

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Oct 30, 2012 Post Script:  It turns out that at least one recent peer reviewed study in fact has in fact vouched for a warmer Warming Period and a cooler Little Ice Age.  You may read about  it here: 

 http://elliotkennel.blogspot.com/2012/10/post-script-medieval-warming-period-and.html
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Additional Reading

Check out the present average monthly temperatures in Greenland, and tell us how Vikings were able to grow crops there if the temperatures were lower in the 10th century than they are now... http://www.greenland.com/en/about-greenland/natur-klima/vejret-i-groenland/gennemsnitstemperaturer.aspx

Kim, B.; Yoon, Ho Il; Kang, Cheon Yun; Bahk, Jang Jun (2002). "Unstable Climate Oscillations during the Late Holocene in the Eastern Bransfield Basin, Antarctic Peninsula". Quaternary Research 58 (3): 234

J. Fabres et al., Branfield Basin fine-grained sediments:  Late Holocene Sedimentary Processes and Antarctic Oceanographic Conditions, The Holocene September 2000 vol. 10 no. 6 703-718  http://hol.sagepub.com/content/10/6/703.abstract

http://elliotkennel.blogspot.com/2012/04/significance-of-year-without-summer.html 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medieval_Warm_Period

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis of Climate Change  http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/paleo/pubs/ipcc2007/ipcc2007.html    

Climate Change in the Baltic Sea Area, HELCOM Thematic Assessment in 2007, Baltic Sea Environment Proceedings No. 111 Helsinki Commission, Baltic Marine Environment Protection Commission http://www.helcom.fi/stc/files/Publications/Proceedings/bsep111.pdf

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The Significance of the Year Without a Summer

In 1815, the Indonesian volcano Tambora exploded in multiple  spectacular eruptions, two of which were major.  In total, it ejected an astonishing 50 cubic kilometers of magma into the atmosphere. the eruptions were heard over 1300 kilometers away (Zollinger, 1855, p.19).

If this estimate is correct, it  is a staggering amount of particulate--about 100 billion tons.  To compare this to coal-derived particulates, in 2012 the world will consume about 7 billion tons of coal.  Only a small percentage of that figure would be airborne ash.  Given that that modern plants emit well under 100 ppm particulate mater, Tambora might have emitted over 100,000 times more particulate matter than annual total created by all the coal power plants in the world!

   That is a staggering amount of mineral matter. 

What History Says

      Given that particulate matter, as well as certain chemicals in smog, are known to be able to partially block sunlight, it would  not be surprising to learn that there were consequences planet-wide.  that the following year, 1816, was known as the Year Without a Summer, or in some quarters, Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.   It is a historical fact that in North America the northern US failed to bring a crop to market, and farmers were not able to feed their livestock.  Hence livestock were slaughtered. 

     In Europe, oak trees did not grow rings that year, attesting to the extreme cold.  It also makes me wonder why people who claim to use tree rings to estimate temperature failed to find any evidence of cold weather in 1816--maybe since the ring is missing altogether, some researchers may have ignored the data. 

     According to Higdon, "In New England, eastern Canada, and western Europe, the late spring through early fall of 1816 was extraordinarily cold, an estimated 4-7 Fahrenheit (1.5 to 2.5 Celsius) degrees cooler than normal. In New England alone, wintry weather continued through the summer; snow fell with strong, frigid storms in every summer month and severe frosts destroyed crops repeatedly all season. In Canada, conditions were even worse. Small lakes remained frozen through the middle of July and even the cold-hardy wheat crop failed. The Lancashire Plain of England reported its coldest and wettest July in written history and Geneva, Switzerland had its coldest summer in the span of 1753 to 1960."

  

   According to   De Boer and Sanders, "Weather data for the early nineteenth century indicate a two-to three-year period of weather extremes following the eruption.  Throughout 1816, average surface temperatures in teh Norther Hemisphere were as much as 10 degrees Celsius lower than normal.  A global cooling trend had been in progress for several years before the eruption of Tambora.  The Tambora event accelerated that trend." 

   The basis for the 10 degree number was not specified by De Boer and Sanders, and appears to substantially higher than other estimates.   Schneider. wrote, "In England, the following year temperatures dropped some 1.5 to 2.5 ^oC.  In eastern North America and in Western Europe, the summer of 1816 was reported in places to be 1 to 2.5 ^oC colder than the previous years...In New England the loss of most of the staple crop of Indian corn and the great reduction of the hay crop caused so much hardship in isolated subsistence farms that they year became enshrined in folklore as Eighteen Hundred and Froze to Death.....Whether Tambora caused these events or was merely a component of them --or even a coincidence--is still debated.  For example, even if the eruption caused a 3  ^oC drop in average summer temperatures in New England, such a large cooling isn’t enough by itself to create mid-summer frosts..."

    Earle et al. claim that tree ring growth shows that the 1816 growth ring is missing altogether from trees in Siberia, indicating that the trees did not leave the dormant state and grow during 1816 , presumably due to the cold. 

 

The Scientific Anomaly

 

    The amount of circumstantial testimony concerning 1816 is impressive, at least to the Village Elliot.  However, the consensus view from climatologists is that no substantial change occured in global temperature during that time.  Nothing much happened, as indicated by the summary graphs below, which are taken from various sources including the famous Mann et al. paper (the "Hockey Stick").  Again, a great deal of fuss has been made about the rise in the 20th century, but I have no major complaint about the 20th century data.  Even if the analysis has some errors, there is just too much data indicating that the global average temperature did in fact increase in the 20th century.

   The part that I find extraordinary, however, is the implicit assertion that global average temperature remained remarkably constant for thousands of years up until the 20th century, including the Year Without a Summer.

 

Why it Matters

    The failure to characterize the Year Without a Summer may be one of the most blatant examples of the failure of researchers to agree with the assertions of history.  Moreover, an explanation for the change is readily available (namely, that the massive Tambora eruption was the most significant cause of the dramatic cooling of the earth in 1816 and 1817).  Thus the existence of the Year Without a Summer does not directly contradict the carbon dioxide hypothesis.   

      It does, however call into account the ability of climatologists to observe changes in global temperature from the past. In my opinion, it is simply weird that the weather could have been so cold that snow and frost occurred in June, July and August in the Northern Hemisphere (Eastern US, northern Europe, and Siberia).  In fact it was so cold that trees on three continents--North America, Europe and Asia-- failed to come out of dormancy in the spring of 1816, so that tree rings did not even grow.  Yet consensus climatology assures us that the tree ring data is consistent with only a mild fluctuation of about 0.1 to 0.3 degrees Celsius, juding from the compilation provided to us by Mann et al as well as other groups.    

    Note that the consensus view also denies that there was a global temperature change associated with the Little Ice Age or the Medieval Warming Period.  As will be made clear in a future blog, there are very strong historical reasons for believing that these periods were real.  In particular, it is astonishing to believe that medieval Vikings could have had settlement of 2000 or more people in 600 farms if the global temperature were not substantially warmer than it is today. 

     If the scientific community were to agree that global temperature changes of a few degrees have occurred in the historical past, this does not negate the possibility of the CO2 Greenhouse Global Warming Theory being largely correct.  It would however, imply that the door should be left open, at least a crack, for other factors that might influence global temperatures, in addition to carbon dioxide.  

For Additional Reading


Tambora Volcano:  World's Largest Recorded Volcanic Eruption, J. Daniel Perkins,
http://jdanielperkins.wordpress.com/tag/tambora/

Gerald Stanhill, Shabtai Cohen, Globaldimming: a review of the evidence for a widespread and significant reduction in global radiation with discussion of its probable causes and possible agricultural consequences, Agricultural and Forest Meteorology Volume 107, Issue 4, 19 April 2001, Pages 255–278

David G. Streets, Ye Wu, Mian Chin, Two-decadal aerosol trends as a likely explanation of the global dimming/brightening transition, GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH LETTERS, VOL. 33, L15806, 4 PP., 2006

Mark Z. Jacobson, Climate response of fossil fuel and biofuel soot, accounting for soot's feedback to snow and sea ice albedo and emissivity, JOURNAL OF GEOPHYSICAL RESEARCH, VOL. 109, D21201, 15 PP., 2004

 

P. D. Jones et al., Surface air temperature and its changes over the past 150 years REVIEWS OF GEOPHYSICS, VOL. 37, NO. 2, PP. 173-199, 1999

Kushner, Paul J., Isaac M. Held, Thomas L. Delworth, 2001: Southern Hemisphere Atmospheric Circulation Response to Global Warming. J. Climate, 14, 2238–2249.

J. Hansen,    M. Sato, and R. Ruedy, Long-term changes of the diurnal temperature cycle: implications about mechanisms of global climate change, Atmospheric Research, Volume 37, Issues 1–3, July 1995, Pages 175–209.

Steven C. Sherwood,    John R. Lanzante, and Cathryn L. Meyer, Radiosonde Daytime Biases and Late-20th Century Warming,  Published Online August 11 2005

Science 2 September 2005: Vol. 309 no. 5740 pp. 1556-1559

M. J. Filipiak, C. J. Merchant, H. Kettle1, and P. Le Borgne, An empirical model for the statistics of sea surface diurnal warming, Ocean Sci., 8, 197–209, 2012

M. Chenoweth, Ships' logbooks and the year without a summer,  Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 1996  vol. 77, no 9, pp. 2077-2093.

Rebecca Wood,  The Year Without a Summer,  Centreville Patch 

http://centreville.patch.com/articles/the-year-without-a-summer

Useful Tree Species for Tree Ring Dating,   http://www.ltrr.arizona.edu/lorim/good.html

Stoffel, M.; Bollschweiler, M.; Butler, D.R.; Luckman, B.H. (Eds.), Tree Rings and Natural Hazards:  A State-of-Art Series: Advances in Global Change Research, Vol. 41

1st Edition., 2010, XV, 505 p. 177 illus.

Michael Mann et al., “Proxy-based reconstructions of hemispheric and global surface temperature variations over the past two millenia,”

Melody Higdon, the Year Without a Summer,   1816: The Year Without a Summer  http://melodyhigdon.com/climotalk/Year_Without_A_Summer.htm

Jelle Zeilinga De Boer, Donald Theodore Sanders,

Volcanoes In Human History: The Far-Reaching Effects Of Major Eruptions

Volcanic dust veils and climate: How clear is the connection? — An editorial Stephen H. Schneider   Climatic Change, VOlume 5 Nujmber 2, 1983, 111-113.s

 

C. Begin and L Filion Tree Rings and Natural Hazards, A State of Art...

C. J. Earle, L. B. Brubaker, A. V. Lozhkin and P. M. Anderson  Summer Temperature Since 1600 for the Upper Kolyma Region, Northeastern Russia, Reconstructed from Tree Rings, Arctic and Alpine Research , Vol. 26, No. 1 (Feb., 1994), pp. 60-65

Published by: INSTAAR, University of Colorado

The temperature reconstructions are taken from Wikipedia, http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:2000_Year_Temperature_Comparison.png  (dowloaded April 2012) with the following annotations:

(dark blue 1000-1991): P.D. Jones, K.R. Briffa, T.P. Barnett, and S.F.B. Tett (1998). "High-resolution Palaeoclimatic Records for the last Millennium: Interpretation, Integration and Comparison with General Circulation Model Control-run Temperatures". The Holocene 8: 455-471. doi:10.1191/095968398667194956

• (blue 1000-1980): M.E. Mann, R.S. Bradley, and M.K. Hughes (1999). "Northern Hemisphere Temperatures During the Past Millennium: Inferences, Uncertainties, and Limitations". Geophysical Research Letters 26 (6): 759-762.

• (light blue 1000-1965): Crowley and Lowery (2000). "Northern Hemisphere Temperature Reconstruction". Ambio 29: 51-54. Modified as published in Crowley (2000). "Causes of Climate Change Over the Past 1000 Years". Science 289: 270-277. doi:10.1126/science.289.5477.270

• (lightest blue 1402-1960): K.R. Briffa, T.J. Osborn, F.H. Schweingruber, I.C. Harris, P.D. Jones, S.G. Shiyatov, S.G. and E.A. Vaganov (2001). "Low-frequency temperature variations from a northern tree-ring density network". J. Geophys. Res. 106: 2929-2941.

• (light turquoise 831-1992): J. Esper, E.R. Cook, and F.H. Schweingruber (2002). "Low-Frequency Signals in Long Tree-Ring Chronologies for Reconstructing Past Temperature Variability". Science 295 (5563): 2250-2253. doi:10.1126/science.1066208.

• (green 200-1980): M.E. Mann and P.D. Jones (2003). "Global Surface Temperatures over the Past Two Millennia". Geophysical Research Letters 30 (15): 1820. doi:10.1029/2003GL017814.

• (yellow 200-1995): P.D. Jones and M.E. Mann (2004). "Climate Over Past Millennia". Reviews of Geophysics 42: RG2002. doi:10.1029/2003RG000143

• (orange 1500-1980): S. Huang (2004). "Merging Information from Different Resources for New Insights into Climate Change in the Past and Future". Geophys. Res Lett. 31: L13205. doi:10.1029/2004GL019781

• (red 1-1979): A. Moberg, D.M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N.M. Datsenko and W. Karlén (2005). "Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data". nature 443: 613-617. doi:10.1038/nature03265

• (dark red 1600-1990): J.H. Oerlemans (2005). "Extracting a Climate Signal from 169 Glacier Records". Science 308: 675-677. doi:10.1126/science.1107046

• (black 1856-2004): Instrumental data was jointly compiled by the w:Climatic Research Unit and the UK Meteorological Office Hadley Centre. Global Annual Average data set TaveGL2v [2] was used.