New CO2 Data Reflects Ice Cap Formation

Of course the hidden assumption is that dropping CO2 led to a growth of the South Polar Ice Cap. What if dropping temperatures caused a sharp drop in atmospheric CO2 instead? Which is most realistic?

Right now a whole range of questions are wide open. Was there a Northern Cap or did we in fact have to wait for the creation of the blockage at Panama around a million years ago? If not, why not?

Polar glaciation forming an Ice cap is dependent on the presence of a continental land mass within fifteen degrees of the pole. It will force the ice further away but that is the minimum need. Antarctica today is perfectly positioned to produce a maximal ice cap. It is also ringed by open ocean sealing it off from much external weather. It is optimized to be our climate refrigerator and is also well balanced so as not to place stress on the crust.

In fact we know from the polar ice record that a warming climate leads production of CO2. Thus what evidence is now available suggests that our present assumptions are exactly backward.

An obvious conjecture is that a simple lack of polar lands led to tropical conditions on a global basis. I am sure that every winter, the oceans froze over and that a good yard or so of sea ice was produced. Yet with the spring, this all broke up and was quickly dispersed and the full blast of twenty four hour sunlight reasserted itself.

This sort of assertive material finds its way into text books and whole generations grow up believing this as correct. Except both interpretations have merit, yet the latter one today has the weight of present evidence however scant.

New CO2 Data Helps Unlock The Secrets Of Antarctic Formation

by Staff Writers
Cardiff, UK (SPX) Sep 15, 2009

http://www.terradaily.com/reports/New_CO2_Data_Helps_Unlock_The_Secrets_Of_Antarctic_Formation_999.html

The link between declining CO2 levels in the earth's atmosphere and the formation of the Antarctic ice caps some 34 million years ago has been confirmed for the first time in a major research study.

A team of scientists from Cardiff, Bristol and Texas A and M universities braved the lions and hyenas of a small East African village to extract microfossils in samples of rocks which show the level of CO2 in the Earth's atmosphere at the time of the formation of the ice-cap.

Geologists have long speculated that the formation of the Antarctic ice-cap was caused by a gradually diminishing natural greenhouse effect.

The study's findings, published in Nature online, confirm that atmospheric CO2 declined during the Eocene - Oligocene climate transition and that the Antarctic ice sheet began to form when CO2 in the atmosphere reached a tipping point of around 760 parts per million (by volume).

Professor Paul Pearson from Cardiff University's School of Earth and Ocean Sciences, who led the mission to the remote East Africa village of Stakishari said: "About 34 million years ago the Earth experienced a mysterious cooling trend. Glaciers and small ice sheets developed in Antarctica, sea levels fell and temperate forests began to displace tropical-type vegetation in many areas.

"The period, known to geologists as the Eocene - Oligocene transition, culminated in the rapid development of a continental-scale ice sheet on Antarctica, which has been there ever since.

"We therefore set out to establish whether there was a substantial decline in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels as the Antarctic ice sheet began to grow."

The team mapped large expanses of bush and wilderness and pieced together the underlying local rock formations using occasional outcrops of rocks and stream beds.

Eventually they discovered sediments of the right age near a traditional African village called Stakishari. By assembling a drilling rig and extracting hundreds of meters of samples from under the ground they were able to obtain exactly the piece of Earth's history they had been searching for.

Co-author Dr Gavin Foster from the University of Bristol Earth Sciences Department said: "By using the rather unique set of samples from Tanzania and a new analytical technique that I developed, we have, for the first time, been able to reconstruct the concentration of CO2 across the Eocene-Oligocene boundary - the time period about 34 million years ago when ice sheets first started to grow on Eastern Antarctica. "
The new findings offer important lessons for the future and will add to the debate around rising CO2 levels in the earth's atmosphere as the world's attention turns to on UN Climate Conference, which opens in Copenhagen later this year.

Co-author Dr Bridget Wade from Texas A and M University Department of Geology and Geophysics added: "This was the biggest climate switch since the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.

"Our study is the first to provide a direct link between the establishment of an ice sheet on Antarctica and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and therefore confirms the relationship between carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global climate."

Us Geological Survey on Global Warming

This report was pieced together over the past two years and we can assume a strong bias toward the global warming orthodoxy. Even with that, this report is muted if this article is a sample of the best interpretation of the reports contents.

The statement is made that the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are losing 48 cubic miles per year. How that is calculated with the slightest confidence escapes me. That it is no longer likely to be true does not.

More importantly, they are advising that greater volatility is to be anticipated. They likely could have got that from the geological record, because we have had pretty serious shift in climate over the millennia and cooling in particular has shown it to be sudden which is not true of warming.

Over the last eighteen months we have lost a global 0.7 degrees. Imagine this going on for another three years. That would be a total 2.8 degrees. That is a lot and it is abrupt. Yet three volcanoes going of in the tropics could do it nicely or perhaps one Volcano in Kamchatka could do it nicely for the Northern Hemisphere.

In fact, the Little Ice Age needs one nasty volcano. Our real problem is that there are so many to choose from out of Alaska.

Anyway, this report surely started with the global warming premise, so judge it accordingly.

"Faster Climate Change Feared"

... New Report Points to Accelerated Melting, Longer Drought

(Source: Washington Post, 12/25/08)

The United States faces the possibility of much more rapid climate change by the end of the century than previous studies have suggested, according to a new report led by the U.S. Geological Survey.

The survey -- which was commissioned by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program and issued this month -- expands on the 2007 findings of the United Nations Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change. Looking at factors such as rapid sea ice loss in the Arctic and prolonged drought in the Southwest, the new assessment suggests that earlier projections may have underestimated the climatic shifts that could take place by 2100.

However, the assessment also suggests that some other feared effects of global warming are not likely to occur by the end of the century, such as an abrupt release of methane from the seabed and permafrost or a shutdown of the Atlantic Ocean circulation system that brings warm water north and colder water south. But the report projects an amount of potential sea level rise during that period that may be greater than what other researchers have anticipated, as well as a shift to a more arid climate pattern in the Southwest by mid-century.

Thirty-two scientists from federal and non-federal institutions contributed to the report, which took nearly two years to complete. The Climate Change Science Program, which was established in 1990, coordinates the climate research of 13 different federal agencies.

Tom Armstrong, senior adviser for global change programs at USGS, said the report "shows how quickly the information is advancing" on potential climate shifts. The prospect of abrupt climate change, he said, "is one of those things that keeps people up at night, because it's a low-probability but high-risk scenario. It's unlikely to happen in our lifetimes, but if it were to occur, it would be life-changing."

In one of the report's most worrisome findings, the agency estimates that in light of recent ice sheet melting, global sea level rise could be as much as four feet by 2100. The IPCC had projected a sea level rise of no more than 1.5 feet by that time, but satellite data over the past two years show the world's major ice sheets are melting much more rapidly than previously thought. The Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets are now losing an average of 48 cubic miles of ice a year, equivalent to twice the amount of ice that exists in the Alps.

Konrad Steffen, who directs the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado at Boulder and was lead author on the report's chapter on ice sheets, said the models the IPCC used did not factor in some of the dynamics that scientists now understand about ice sheet melting. Among other things, Steffen and his collaborators have identified a process of "lubrication," in which warmer ocean water gets in underneath coastal ice sheets and accelerates melting.

"This has to be put into models," said Steffen, who organized a conference last summer in St. Petersburg, Russia, as part of an effort to develop more sophisticated ice sheet models. "What we predicted is sea level rise will be higher, but I have to be honest, we cannot model it for 2100 yet."

Still, Armstrong said the report "does take a step forward from where the IPCC was," especially in terms of ice sheet melting.

Scientists also looked at the prospect of prolonged drought over the next 100 years. They said it is impossible to determine yet whether human activity is responsible for the drought the Southwestern United States has experienced over the past decade, but every indication suggests the region will become consistently drier in the next several decades. Richard Seager, a senior research scientist at Columbia University's Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, said that nearly all of the 24 computer models the group surveyed project the same climatic conditions for the North American Southwest, which includes Mexico.

"If the models are correct, it will transition in the coming years and decades to a more arid climate, and that transition is already underway," Seager said, adding that such conditions would probably include prolonged droughts lasting more than a decade.

The current models cover broad swaths of landscape, and Seager said scientists need to work on developing versions that can make projections on a much smaller scale. "That's what the water managers out there really need," he said. Current models "don't give them the hard numbers they need."

Armstrong said the need for "downscaled models" is one of the challenges facing the federal government, along with better coordination among agencies on the issue of climate change. When it comes to abrupt climate shifts, he said, "We need to be prepared to deal with it in terms of policymaking, keeping in mind it's a low-probability, high-risk scenario. That said, there are really no policies in place to deal with abrupt climate change."

Richard Moss, who directed the Climate Change Science Program's coordination office between 2000 and 2006 and now serves as vice president and managing director for climate change at the World Wildlife Fund-U.S., welcomed the new report but called it "way overdue."

"There is finally a greater flow of climate science from the administration," Moss said, noting that the report was originally scheduled to come out in the summer of 2007. "It really is showing the potential for abrupt climate change is real."

The report is reassuring, however, on the prospects for some potentially drastic effects -- such as a huge release of methane, a potent heat-trapping gas, that is now locked deep in the seabed and underneath the Arctic permafrost. That is unlikely to occur in the near future, the scientists said.

"It's unlikely that we're going to see an abrupt change in methane over the next hundred years, but we should worry about it over a longer time frame," said Ed Brook, the lead author of the methane chapter and a geosciences professor at Oregon State University. "All of these places where methane is stored are vulnerable to leaking."

By the end the century, Brook said, the amount of methane escaping from natural sources such as the Arctic tundra and waterlogged soils in warmer regions "could possibly double," but that would still be less than the current level of human-generated methane emissions. Over the course of the next thousand years, he added, methane hydrates stored deep in the seabed could be released: "Once you start melting there, you can't really take it back."

In the near term, Brook said, more precise monitoring of methane levels worldwide would give researchers a better sense of the risk of a bigger atmospheric release. "We don't know exactly how much methane is coming out all over the world," he said. "That's why monitoring is important."

While predictions remain uncertain, Steffen said cutting emissions linked to global warming represents one of the best strategies for averting catastrophic changes.

"We have to act very fast, by understanding better and by reducing our greenhouse gas emissions, because it's a large-scale experiment that can get out of hand," Steffen said. "So we don't want that to happen."

Glacial Silt

This article is a bit of a stretch but is a nice bit of information on the utility of ice in delivering nutrients to the Ocean.
I for one would like to see a workable strategy for getting nutrients into the oceanic biozone and ice does not leap to mind.
There is merit in the concept of a horizontal tube reaching deep into the ocean that I have toyed with for years. It is a bit of engineering still well beyond us I think. If it could work, the pressure and temperature gradients will sustain a massive continuing lift of nutrient rich waters to the surface such as happens around a sea mount.
The outflow would support a huge adjacent biomass.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/07/melting-icebergs-slow-global-warming

Melting ice may slow global warming

Scientists discover that minerals found in collapsing ice sheets could feed plankton and cut C02 emissions

David Adam, environment correspondent
The Observer, Sunday December 7 2008

Collapsing antarctic ice sheets, which have become potent symbols of global warming, may actually turn out to help in the battle against climate change and soaring carbon emissions.

Professor Rob Raiswell, a geologist at the University of Leeds, says that as the sheets break off the ice covering the continent, floating icebergs are produced that gouge minerals from the bedrock as they make their way to the sea. Raiswell believes that the accumulated frozen mud could breathe life into the icy waters around Antarctica, triggering a large, natural removal of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

And as rising temperatures cause the ice sheets to break up faster, creating more icebergs, the amount of carbon dioxide removed will also rise. Raiswell says: ' It won't solve the problem, but it might buy us some time.'

As the icebergs drift northwards, they sprinkle the minerals through the ocean. Among these minerals, Raiswell's research shows, are iron compounds that can fertilise large-scale growth of photosynthetic plankton, which take in carbon dioxide from the air as they flourish.

According to his calculations, melting Antarctic icebergs already deposit up to 120,000 tonnes of this 'bioavailable' iron into the Southern Ocean each year, enough to grow sufficient plankton to remove some 2.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide, equivalent to the annual carbon pollution of India and Japan.

A 1 per cent increase in the number of icebergs in the Southern Ocean could remove an extra 26 million tonnes of CO2, equivalent to the annual emissions of Croatia.

Raiswell, a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellow, said: 'We see the rapid ice loss in Antarctica as one obvious sign of climate warming, but could it be the Earth's attempt to save us from global warming?' He added that the effect had not been discovered before because scientists assumed that the iron in the iceberg sediment was inert and could not be used by plankton.

In a paper published in the journal Geochemical Transactions, Raiswell and colleagues at the University of Bristol and the University of California describe how they chipped samples off four Antarctic icebergs blown ashore on Seymour island by a storm in the Weddell Sea.

They found that they contained grains of ferrihydrite and schwertmannite, two iron minerals that could boost plankton growth. 'These are the first measurements of potentially bioavailable iron on Antarctic ice-hosted sediments,' they write. 'Identifying icebergs as a significant source of bioavailable iron may shed new light on how the oceans respond to atmospheric warming.'

No rivers flow into the Southern Ocean and the only previously identified major source of iron for its anaemic waters is dust blown from South America. The team says that icebergs could deliver at least as much iron as the dust.

A key question is how much of the carbon soaked up by the growing plankton is returned to the atmosphere. 'We simply don't know the answer to that,' Raiswell said. Seeding the oceans with iron will only benefit the climate if the plankton sink to the bottom when they die, taking the carbon with them.

David Vaughan, a glaciologist with the British Antarctic Survey, said: 'It's a very interesting new line of research and one that should be looked at in more detail.'

He said the number of icebergs in the Antarctic was expected to rise by about 20 per cent by the end of the century, which could remove an extra 500 million tonnes of carbon dioxide each year, if they all seeded plankton growth.

Svenmark Cosmic Ray Experiment

I have just come across this item from last year but it must be considered. It has been demonstrated in lab conditions that ambient cosmic ray flux generates the precursors for cloud formation. We get no sense from this as yet regarding what percentage this represents of the cloud cover.

We learn that the combining of water and sulphuric acid is a necessary precursor to cloud formation and that liberation of electrons by cosmic rays drives the process or at least that is the reasonable inference.

At least we can also now link pollution to its potential climatic effects a little better.

Assuming that variation in the sun’s activity level affects Earth’s Magnetic field we have a natural force multiplier that needs to be properly mapped and whose effects need to be modeled and confirmed if that is ever possible.

I share Nigel’s frustration with the state of scientific literacy in the press.

When I began this blog, I commented that I expected the proponents of the CO2 – Global Warming linkage hypothesis to be made fools of by Mother Nature. Both phenomena are very important and demand responses. The problem was always in the linkage idea. It was simply the introduction of an unnecessary extra theory that could cause problems for the real issues. And it was not necassary.

The linkage hypothesis has been dust for ten years and we are now facing major indicators pointing the other way.



February 11, 2007

An experiment that hints we are wrong on climate change

Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist, says the orthodoxy must be challenged


When politicians and journalists declare that the science of global warming is settled, they show a regrettable ignorance about how science works. We were treated to another dose of it recently when the experts of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued the Summary for Policymakers that puts the political spin on an unfinished scientific dossier on climate change due for publication in a few months’ time. They declared that most of the rise in temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to man-made greenhouse gases.

The small print explains “very likely” as meaning that the experts who made the judgment felt 90% sure about it. Older readers may recall a press conference at Harwell in 1958 when Sir John Cockcroft, Britain’s top nuclear physicist, said he was 90% certain that his lads had achieved controlled nuclear fusion. It turned out that he was wrong. More positively, a 10% uncertainty in any theory is a wide open breach for any latter day Galileo or Einstein to storm through with a better idea. That is how science really works.

Twenty years ago, climate research became politicized in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers. And while the media usually find mavericks at least entertaining, in this case they often imagine that anyone who doubts the hypothesis of man-made global warming must be in the pay of the oil companies. As a result, some key discoveries in climate research go almost unreported.

Enthusiasm for the global-warming scare also ensures that heat waves make headlines, while contrary symptoms, such as this winter’s billion-dollar loss of Californian crops to unusual frost, are relegated to the business pages. The early arrival of migrant birds in spring provides colourful evidence for a recent warming of the northern lands. But did anyone tell you that in east Antarctica the Adélie penguins and Cape petrels are turning up at their spring nesting sites around nine days later than they did 50 years ago? While sea-ice has diminished in the Arctic since 1978, it has grown by 8% in the Southern Ocean.

Bottom of Form

So one awkward question you can ask, when you’re forking out those extra taxes for climate change, is “Why is east Antarctica getting colder?” It makes no sense at all if carbon dioxide is driving global warming. While you’re at it, you might inquire whether Gordon Brown will give you a refund if it’s confirmed that global warming has stopped. The best measurements of global air temperatures come from American weather satellites, and they show wobbles but no overall change since 1999.

That leveling off is just what is expected by the chief rival hypothesis, which says that the sun drives climate changes more emphatically than greenhouse gases do. After becoming much more active during the 20th century, the sun now stands at a high but roughly level state of activity. Solar physicists warn of possible global cooling, should the sun revert to the lazier mood it was in during the Little Ice Age 300 years ago.

Climate history and related archeology give solid support to the solar hypothesis. The 20th-century episode, or Modern Warming, was just the latest in a long string of similar events produced by a hyperactive sun, of which the last was the Medieval Warming.

The Chinese population doubled then, while in Europe the Vikings and cathedral-builders prospered. Fascinating relics of earlier episodes come from the Swiss Alps, with the rediscovery in 2003 of a long-forgotten pass used intermittently whenever the world was warm.

What does the Intergovernmental Panel do with such emphatic evidence for an alternation of warm and cold periods, linked to solar activity and going on long before human industry was a possible factor? Less than nothing. The 2007 Summary for Policymakers boasts of cutting in half a very small contribution by the sun to climate change conceded in a 2001 report.

Disdain for the sun goes with a failure by the self-appointed greenhouse experts to keep up with inconvenient discoveries about how the solar variations control the climate. The sun’s brightness may change too little to account for the big swings in the climate. But more than 10 years have passed since Henrik Svensmark in Copenhagen first pointed out a much more powerful mechanism.

He saw from compilations of weather satellite data that cloudiness varies according to how many atomic particles are coming in from exploded stars. More cosmic rays, more clouds. The sun’s magnetic field bats away many of the cosmic rays, and its intensification during the 20th century meant fewer cosmic rays, fewer clouds, and a warmer world. On the other hand the Little Ice Age was chilly because the lazy sun let in more cosmic rays, leaving the world cloudier and gloomier.

The only trouble with Svensmark’s idea — apart from its being politically incorrect — was that meteorologists denied that cosmic rays could be involved in cloud formation. After long delays in scraping together the funds for an experiment, Svensmark and his small team at the Danish National Space Center hit the jackpot in the summer of 2005.

In a box of air in the basement, they were able to show that electrons set free by cosmic rays coming through the ceiling stitched together droplets of sulphuric acid and water. These are the building blocks for cloud condensation. But journal after journal declined to publish their report; the discovery finally appeared in the Proceedings of the Royal Society late last year.

Thanks to having written The Manic Sun, a book about Svensmark’s initial discovery published in 1997, I have been privileged to be on the inside track for reporting his struggles and successes since then. The outcome is a second book, The Chilling Stars, co-authored by the two of us and published next week by Icon books. We are not exaggerating, we believe, when we subtitle it “A new theory of climate change”.

Where does all that leave the impact of greenhouse gases? Their effects are likely to be a good deal less than advertised, but nobody can really say until the implications of the new theory of climate change are more fully worked out.

The reappraisal starts with Antarctica, where those contradictory temperature trends are directly predicted by Svensmark’s scenario, because the snow there is whiter than the cloud-tops. Meanwhile humility in face of Nature’s marvels seems more appropriate than arrogant assertions that we can forecast and even control a climate ruled by the sun and the stars.

Arctic and Antarctic heat balance

The one fact that I find most disturbing about the Global Warming debate is that climatologists think that the Antarctic temperature has dropped by a degree. What this is really saying is that it is very likely that the net heat gain in the Arctic is almost exactly offset by the net heat loss in the Antarctic. Which implies that the greenhouse gas explanation is spurious.

The effect unfortunately looks a lot different at the two poles, due in the one case to a nearly closed off circulation system and a strongly disrupted one on the other hand. I think it will be very difficult to achieve scientific precision. However, the greenhouse effect is categorically not warming the Antarctic, and it needs to be if the theory is to retain any credence.

It makes total sense that the two poles are slightly out of balance in their ability to lose and gain heat. Variability is then a function of the corrective process. And it appears that over the centuries, the Arctic tends to warm and the Antarctic tends to chill. As I posted earlier, this can be corrected by the expedient of injecting a larger mass than normal of cold Antarctic water into the Atlantic.

The last major injection took place in the fifteenth century, triggering the little ice age in Europe. What we do not understand is if this process is triggered by a warming Arctic in some manner or is just random. With our sparsity of knowledge, we see a likely direct connection from this one data point. Yet I am not sure that we can trace another such event since the Bronze Age. The Romans did grow grapes in England after all.

We really need to get a better handle on post Bronze Age climate. The cooling effect could actually be controlled by a normal low level pulsing of the currents that may cycle through several decades and is only rarely disturbed.

Without a corrective measure, I am certain that the Arctic will return to Bronze Age conditions, which we are swiftly approaching right now. Those conditions are inherently stable unless there is an injection of cold water into the South Atlantic.

Now you know why I am looking over my shoulder.

Margin of Error anf Global Warming

Margin of Error and Global Warming

How do we obtain an accurate measure of the several forces at work affecting our climate? We have just been reminded that cloud cover is impossible to properly model at all. This means that whatever factor or function is assigned to its effect, its statistical error range will be huge.

For any given point of earth, the local temperature can already be safely written as T + or – 50 degrees F. Ocean temperature is very consistent but its volumetric flow rate is anyone’s guess. Remember that we measured the apparent volume of the Gulf Stream recently and found it had apparently declined by around forty percent since 1957. With two data points, we have no clue if it is significant. More recent work suggests that the effect is much more variable than we ever guessed.

See: http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=159

I think that the important conclusion that we can draw is that the globe has several mechanisms whose variation within their natural range are quite capable of shifting global temperature around in the order of magnitudes that we are experiencing and have experienced historically. These same mechanisms also must move to moderate any such temperature variation. The sense is that if a trend goes too far in one direction, counter balancing triggers kick in and a lot sooner than is obvious.

We recap the mechanisms:

We have the man made direct impact of particulate production that is allowing more heat to be absorbed by the atmosphere.

We have the warming of the North Pole if sustained will eventually induce a warmer and perhaps wetter arctic.

We have agriculture, which has historically been a releaser of carbon, perhaps now about to become the major collector of all the carbon ever produced and perhaps a much larger absorber of solar energy through expansion into the deserts..

We have the speculation that cold water from the South Atlantic has periodically been injected into the Atlantic with major chilling effects on Europe and North America. The south polar sea is the primary engine of cooling on this planet because of the unusual location of Antarctica and the related circum polar current. Recall that all the cold water available for cooling in the Pacific comes from Antarctia.

Last but not least we may have the possible impact of the greenhouse mechanism.

Those are a lot of levers to juggle in any atmospheric model. And we truly need a thousand years of data to secure any knowledge that we can trust. What we have now is the knowledge that it has been hotter and it has been colder.

In the meantime, the best that we can hope to do is to regulate our global society to eliminate non carbon atmospheric pollution and to sequester carbon in all agricultural croplands as an economic bonus. And as an extra bonus, we want to grow forests on all the dry lands which will nicely double the amount of land under tree cover, absorbing solar energy and using it to sequester carbon.

Cold Water on Global Warming

After alluding to the role of Antarctica yesterday, I think it is appropriate to add this article from 2001.

The climate of the northern hemisphere has experienced several major swings in climatic conditions over the past 10,000 years. The bronze age in particular appears to have been hotter that it is now as was the period before 1500 and the little ice age. The current hot spell seems to be doing no more than restoring those conditions. I also point out that these warm spells were very stable, while the sudden onset of a cold climate was abrupt. I posit that the only way it is possible to have such a shift is if the surface waters of the ocean itself was abruptly chilled by perhaps a degree.

And then the question is how? We have been blithely blaming the sun. I suspect that may well be rubbish. On the other hand we have a mechanism large enough in the southern hemisphere capable of doing this. And particularly doing this to the closed off Atlantic.

What would it take? There we do not know. Perhaps a build up of sea ice, or perhaps a decline in sea ice? That is the one thing capable of a long cycle of variation with periodic discharges into the Pacific and South Atlantic.

A discharge of cold water into the Atlantic would certainly impact on the whole of the Atlantic very quickly. It is also totally believable and I hope, unlikely to happen for a few centuries. At least enough time to get the permafrost out of the soil in Greenland and to reestablish the dairy industry there.

Here is the article:


http://www.gsfc.nasa.gov/topstory/20010917seaice.html

September 18, 2001 - (date of web publication)

El Niño, La Niña Rearrange South Pole Sea Ice

Scientists have been mystified by observations that when sea ice on one side of the South Pole recedes, it advances farther out on the other side. New findings from NASA's Office of Polar Programs suggests for the first time that this is the result of El Niños and La Niñas driving changes in the subtropical jet stream, which then alter the path of storms that move sea ice around the South Pole.

	Image 1

The results have important implications for understanding global climate change better because sea ice contributes to the Earth's energy balance. The presence of sea ice, which is generated around each pole when the water gets cold enough to freeze, reflects solar energy back out to space, cooling the planet. When there is less sea ice, the ocean absorbs the sun's heat and that amplifies climate warming.

By looking at the relationship between temperature changes in the ocean, atmospheric winds, storms, and sea ice, the new study pinpoints causes for retreating and advancing ice in the Atlantic and Pacific ocean basins on either side of the South Pole, called the "Antarctic dipole."

	Image 2

"El Niños and La Niñas appear to be the originating agents for helping generate the sea ice dipole observed in the ocean basins around the Antarctic," said David Rind, lead author of the study and a senior climate researcher at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The study appears in the September 17 issue of Journal of Geophysical Research.

During El Niño years, when the waters of the Eastern Pacific heat up, warm air rises. As the air rises it starts to move toward the South Pole, but the earth's rotation turns the winds eastward. The Earth's rotation is just strong enough to cause this rising air to strengthen the subtropical jet stream, a band of atmospheric wind near the equator that also blows eastward.

When the subtropical jet stream gets stronger over the Pacific basin, it diverts storms away from the Pacific side of the South Pole. Since there are fewer storms near the Pacific-Antarctic region during El Niño years, there are less winds to blow sea ice farther out into the ocean, and ice stays close to shore.

At the same time, the air in the tropical Atlantic basin sinks instead of rising. That sinking air weakens the subtropical jet stream over the Atlantic, guiding storms towards the South Pole. The storms, which intensify as they meet the cooler Antarctic air, then blow sea ice away from the pole farther into the Atlantic.

During La Niña years, when the Eastern and central Pacific waters cool, there is an opposite effect, where sea ice subsides on the Atlantic side, and advances on the Pacific side.

The study is important because the amount of sea ice that extends out into the ocean plays a key role in amplifying or decreasing the warming effects of the sun on our climate. Also, the study explains causes of the Antarctic sea ice dipole for the first time, and provides researchers with a greater understanding of the effects of El Niño and La Niña on sea ice.

Scientists may use these findings in global climate models to gauge past, present and future climate changes.

"Understanding how changes in the temperature in the different ocean basins will affect sea ice is an important part of the puzzle in understanding climate sensitivity," Rind said.

The Global Temperatrure Trend

I am reposting this post by Roger Coppock from the news groups.

July tied for 8th warmest of the 128 year NASA global land record.

Lately, fossil fools fondly repeat a lie about global warming slowing down. "Global warming ended in 1998," they say. The truth is published here every month in this section of these reports:

The month of July in the year 2007, is linearly projected to be 14.397, yet it was 14.57 above projected.

Using the line of regression, the temperature is projected. If global warming reversed, the actual measured temperatures would have to fall below the line of regression temperature, and do so for a year or more. So far this has not happened, not for even two months in a row.

Measured temperatures which are nearly always above projected temperatures mean that the temperature rise is accelerating. This is simple geometry. Each above the line measured global temperature raises the slope of the regression line when that new point joins the data. This pattern is now 5 decades old.

Please see:
http://members.cox.net/rcoppock/Slope1952-2006.jpg

Clearly therefore, the fossil fools lie, and global mean
surface temperatures continue to rise.

These globally averaged temperature data come from NASA:

http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/tabledata/GLB.Ts.txt

They represent the results of tens of millions of readings taken at thousands of stations covering all the lands of the Earth over the last 128 years. Yes, the data are corrected for the urban heat island effect.

The Mean July temperature over the last 128 years is 14.024 C.
The Variance is 0.08871.
The Standard Deviation is 0.2978.

Rxy 0.72910 Rxy^2 0.53159
TEMP = 13.644595 + (0.005877 * (YEAR-1879))
Degrees of Freedom = 126 F = 142.99616
Confidence of nonzero correlation = approximately
0.999999999999999999999 (21 nines), which is darn close to 100%!

The month of July in the year 2007, is linearly projected to be 14.397, yet it was 14.57. <- Above projected. The sum of the residuals is 21.14880

Exponential least squares fit: TEMP = 13.647507 * e^(.0004181 * (YEAR-1879))
The sum of the residuals is 21.10617

Rank of the months of July
Year Temp C Anomaly Z score
1998 14.90 0.876 2.94
2002 14.73 0.706 2.37
1990 14.66 0.636 2.14
2005 14.66 0.636 2.14
1995 14.60 0.576 1.94
1991 14.59 0.566 1.90
2006 14.59 0.566 1.90
2007 14.57 0.546 1.83 <-- 2001 14.57 0.546 1.83 2003 14.54 0.516 1.73 1981 14.51 0.486 1.63 1999 14.51 0.486 1.63 1987 14.50 0.476 1.60 MEAN 14.024 0.000 0.00 1892 13.68 -0.344 -1.15 1902 13.68 -0.344 -1.15 1889 13.66 -0.364 -1.22 1899 13.66 -0.364 -1.22 1888 13.64 -0.384 -1.29 1923 13.64 -0.384 -1.29 1912 13.59 -0.434 -1.46 1918 13.59 -0.434 -1.46 1890 13.55 -0.474 -1.59 1882 13.45 -0.574 -1.93 1884 13.44 -0.584 -1.96 1904 13.43 -0.594 -1.99 1895 13.37 -0.654 -2.19 1891 13.19 -0.834 -2.80

The most recent 176 continuous months, or 14 years and 8 months, on this GLB.Ts.txt data set are all above the 1951-1980 data set norm of 14 C.

There are 1531 months of data on this data set:
-- 744 of them are at or above the norm.
-- 787 of them are below the norm.

This run of 176 months above the norm is the result of a warming world. It is too large to occur by chance at any reasonable level of confidence. A major volcano eruption, thermonuclear war, or meteor impact could stop this warming trend for a couple of years,
otherwise expect it to continue.

What he is showing us is that the curve fits a linear up trend since 1960. The actual curve was below the line for the last several years, but this year has jumped above the trend line. Ouch!

I also have a sense that this year the land temperatures are everywhere warmer leaving absolutely no room for argument.

From a larger perspective, we are continuing to recover from the little ice age that abruptly began in the late 15th century that sent Europe reeling and also likely crashed the populations of North America. Corn is very vulnerable.

This ice age is posited as been caused by a reduction in solar activity attested by the lack of sunspot activity.

There is one other mechanism of global warming and cooling that I think we should at least contemplate. Is Antarctica capable of sending periodic ice surges into the south Atlantic, thereby abruptly dropping global surface temperatures by a degree or so?

It is clear to me that the Northern hemisphere will normally stabilize around a regime in which winter sea ice is created and destroyed annually comfortably offsetting the heat pump of the gulf stream. We are watching it happen rapidly now.

So why did we get a little ice age?