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Glacier melted long before climate change


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Scientists have argued that the Pine Island Glacier was melting just as quickly over 8,000 years ago.

The glacier has long been considered to be the perfect example of how carbon emissions have been affecting the environment, but now experts at the British Antarctic Survey have revealed that the glacier had been melting at a similar rate several thousand years ago, long before mankind had been capable of having any impact on the world's climate.

Read More: http://www.unexplain...-climate-change

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The article exposes one of the misunderstandings of the human impact on climate change. There is no argument in the scientific community that the Earth's climate has natural fluctuations according to various cycles, and that previous eras were warmer globally than the current global temperature. That new mechanisms for some phenomena - such as rate of ice sheet/glacier melting - are also being discovered does not mitigate this.

What the scientific community is trying to ascertain is how much impact the 'human-factor' has on the rate of the current warming trend - not that it is responsible for all of it - and whether it will influence this trend resulting in an extreme climate event (warming or cooling), unlike the Holocene warming. That [we are responsible for all of it] is the misconception articles such as the one in the OP promote.

Edited by Leonardo
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My guess about ten percent. No where high enough to affect it by cutting pollution. This cutting pollution has other benefits, like breathing.

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In case nobody noticed: the previous melting occurred 8000 years ago - during the Altithermal warm period. Do you think ice might melt during a warm period? Duh!

This study found exactly what we would expect them to find.

Doug

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It still proves that climate change happens without our help. What ever excuse you want to use.

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It still proves that climate change happens without our help. What ever excuse you want to use.

Nice of you to state the obvious - now what exactly was your point regarding current climate change ?

Br Cornelius

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Remember even back a few million years ago the entire planet including poles were all having a tropical climate. I find this astonishing and not entirely credible facts but is what science says.

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That we have little to do with it.

Perhaps the reason that climate change is lost on the deniers is that it is a highly statistical discipline. People aren't impressed by and don't understand averages, non-linear regression and other commonly-used tools of climate study. Thus, no amount of throwing data at them is going to convince them. Am I right, Daniel?

I use statistical models to ask "what if" questions of my tree ring data. In effect, I talk to it. First model how CO2 and temperature are affecting tree growth. Then eliminate the temperature term, in effect asking the data: what if CO2 increased, but temperature didn't? Then switch with the CO2 term: what if temperature rose but CO2 didn't? Then eliminate both of them: what if neither temperature nor CO2 increased? Multiply one by the other to create a new term: what if changes in one are affecting the other? The data will tell you. The process is called "partial analysis of variance" because you are separating the variability within the data into its component "parts." The entire process has the "feel" of holding a conversation with your data.

My data is saying that CO2 is having a major effect, larger than temperature. Now: what is causing the observed increase in CO2? Find that and you've found the cause of global warming. And we have found it - human activities, mainly burning of fossil fuels, destruction of forests and land clearing for agriculture and throw in a little methane from thawing permafrost and undersea deposits. Those have been quantified. There is more than twice as much being released by these activities as is accumulating in the atmosphere.

The bottom line here is that what is going to happen is going to happen, whether deniers like it or not. You can't shout it away; you can't argue that it isn't happening, especially when you have no data to argue with. And that's the deniers' big problem: they have nothing to back up their side of the argument.

At this point, the Arctic Ocean is going to melt off and we can't stop it. It will be substantially ice-free by 2040. We are already seeing the increased snowfall and an increase in storm severity that that is expected to produce. Climate change is already here. And there's more to come.

Doug

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That we have little to do with it.

Well, to determine that you'd have to show that the current warming trend fits in with a natural cycle indicated by past warming events. It's no good simply knowing that natural warming events/cycles happen, and then passing off the current warming as "part of a natural cycle" - you have to show it fits with a natural cycle.

And not only that, you'd have to show the rate of warming is within the natural variance of those cycles.

Essentially, the AGW sceptics have the ability to show the current warming is entirely natural. So why haven't they?

Why is all the data collected to date suggestive that the current warming is not entirely natural, and does not fit into a natural cycle of warming/cooling?

Edited by Leonardo
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That is what the op and the two temp. Reports indicate. You know the two reports that said there was no warming over last fifteen or twenty years depending on the report.

We are still warming up from the last ice age.

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That is what the op and the two temp. Reports indicate. You know the two reports that said there was no warming over last fifteen or twenty years depending on the report.

We are still warming up from the last ice age.

We stopped warming from the last ice age about 8 thousand years ago. The trend since then has been consistently down with a bit of variability. These are basic facts daniel.

Which specific reports say there has been no warming for 15 years ? There has been warming over the last 15 years and it can be detected in the surface temperature record, the ocean heat content record and in the net energy balance at the top of the atmosphere which has been consistently indicating more energy is arriving than is leaving the planet. On top of that the 4 warmest years in the instrumental record have occurred since the supposed pause began in 1998 (a particularly anomalously warm year - which is coincidently the preferred start date for the skeptics pause calculations).

As Leonardo so eloquently put it, if it is natural warming what is the specific natural cycle which is driving it and how does it account for all of the observed warming. No hand waving here - be specific about what you believe is the driver of the warming and quantify its magnitude.

Br Cornelius

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That is what the op and the two temp. Reports indicate. You know the two reports that said there was no warming over last fifteen or twenty years depending on the report.

We are still warming up from the last ice age.

We are in an ice age, and have been for the past 2 1/2 million years. During that time, there have been several 'interglacials' (periods of warming) and glacials (periods of cooling.) What you refer to as the "ice age" is only the last period of cooling, which ended approx 12,000 years ago.

We should have already passed the peak of the latest interglacial, and the global temperature should be on its way down - if we are to presume the ice age is still in effect - but we are not. The current 'interglacial peak' has lasted much longer than previous peaks and global temperatures are still rising. Now, there could be a natural explanation for that - and could be that the actual ice age (the Pliocene-Quaternary glaciation) is ending - but, if so, it would be the shortest major ice age ever in known geological history. Of the 5 known major ice ages, the shortest duration was on the order of 40 million years for the Andean-Saharan glaciation.

So, if we exclude that natural explanation for the current extended warming, we are left with the explanation that this extension is partly a result of unnatural (i.e. anthropogenic) influences.

Even if you decide to conclude this warming is still part of some undiscovered natural cycle there is still this to consider:

If that is correct and we bite the bullet, sacrifice some economic growth to put into effect 'green technologies' and it therefore has no effect, all we will have lost is some economic growth. Because we could not have impacted the warming in any case.

But, if AGW is a factor and we ignore it, refuse to act, we will at the very least accelerate the loss of significant areas of productive land and be severely affecting the growth of global civilisation.

If we act, we won't lose anything we wouldn't have lost anyway. If we refuse to act, we might lose a lot which we may yet save.

What is the best choice?

Edited by Leonardo
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We are still warming up from the last ice age.

Between about 8000 YBP and about 1907, the long-term temperature trend was DOWN. The current excursion has only lasted 106 years. So how do you explain a 7900 year decline in temps if "We are still warming up from the last ice age."

Doug

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Between about 8000 YBP and about 1907, the long-term temperature trend was DOWN. The current excursion has only lasted 106 years. So how do you explain a 7900 year decline in temps if "We are still warming up from the last ice age."

Doug

by ignoring all that happened before 1907?

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Yeppers, surprise!!

So is this a surprise, despite that fact that the earth's feedback mechanism, which global warmists seemed to ignore, it pretty advanced and complex, regardless of our lack oof knowledge about it.

Doh!!

Volcanic eruptions causing global warming slowdown, study says

17 volcanoes since 2000 account for up to 15% of the difference between predicted and observed warming this century

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/feb/24/volcanic-eruptions-causing-global-warming-slowdown-study-says

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Oh no! Watch out coastal states!

Edited by LimeGelatin
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Yeppers, surprise!!

So is this a surprise, despite that fact that the earth's feedback mechanism, which global warmists seemed to ignore, it pretty advanced and complex, regardless of our lack oof knowledge about it.

Doh!!

Volcanic eruptions causing global warming slowdown, study says

17 volcanoes since 2000 account for up to 15% of the difference between predicted and observed warming this century

http://www.theguardi...down-study-says

And this surprises you because ... ?

Doug

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As long as Antarctica is ice bound we are still in an ice age. We have had a stable climate status for ten thousand years. This is abnormal.

Questionmark. What happened in 1907 that we are ignoring.

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As long as Antarctica is ice bound we are still in an ice age. We have had a stable climate status for ten thousand years. This is abnormal.

Questionmark. What happened in 1907 that we are ignoring.

Best estimates are that if we raise the global mean temp to the boiling point, we'll only have 30 or 40 years between the melt-off of Antarctica and the end of higher life forms on earth (About 300 to 500 years from now.). Using that as a cop-out is a good way to make that inevitable.

In 1907 (Some datasets show 1908 or 1909.) the globally averaged mean temperature reached an 8000-year low.

Doug

Edited by Doug1029
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No, Antarctica was tropical before the beginning of the last ice age. As long as there are glaciers we are in an ice age. The great lakes move south about three inches every hundred years do to the lose of ice.

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No, Antarctica was tropical before the beginning of the last ice age. As long as there are glaciers we are in an ice age. The great lakes move south about three inches every hundred years do to the lose of ice.

quite Daniel, quite, but that was a long time before the last ice age, in fact it was 170 million years ago... and then most of the earth's surface was in one continent called Gondwana in which what is now Antarctica was located much further to the north of the current position.

That has very little to do with the temperatures at the poles, then and now.

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No, Antarctica was tropical before the beginning of the last ice age. As long as there are glaciers we are in an ice age. The great lakes move south about three inches every hundred years do to the lose of ice. The Pleistocene glaciations (Kansan, Nebraskan, Illinoisan and Wisconsinan in North America) have all come and gone since then. They have other names in Europe, leading to endless confusion.

Antarctica iced over about 12 to 15 million years ago when the Straits of Panama closed, rerouting thermohaline circulation. It has been under continuous ice cover since then. Recovered ice cores have been dated to about 250,000 years. NCDC has some datasets available for free. Perhaps I could find out how old the oldest are.

North America has been through at least two glaciations in the last hundred thousand years plus a bunch of stadials (smaller ice advances). Those produced the morraines and shorelines one can still see along the lake (My old junior high school stood on the Wellesley Beach shoreline, five miles from the lake.). Route 20 (See a Rand-McNally road map.) follows the old Arkona Beach across the county (Ashtabula).

The Great Lakes are undergoing isostatic rebound - an increase in elevation caused by the loss of weight from melted ice. I used to live within sight of Lake Erie. The lake rests against the south shore cliffs, while the Canadian side has broad beaches. This is the result of rebound being greater on the north side than on the south. The hinge-point is near Youngstown. Every new high-water episode comes up a little more than the last one did - houses routinely fall in and Walnut Park in Ashtabula has all but disappeared. When I was a kid, the bridge at Whitman's Creek still connected the two ends of the road. Now it's a hundred feet out in the lake. Rebound continues and will continue unless the weight of another glacier again depresses the land. That makes rebound a very poor way of judging whether we're in an ice age.

A better way is sea level. Sea levels have peaked three times during this interglacial. The first one was about 1825 BC at 2.7 feet above modern. Sesostris II ended his canal south of Isamlia because that's where the sea was. The second high stand was about 1000 BC, just as Hebron and Zoane were being built. The high stand was at about 1.5 feet above modern. The highest sea level recorded since the Yarmouth Interglacial was about 250 AD when sea levels reached 5.7 feet above modern. They have never gone that high again - even now, with sea levels rising. Since about 250 AD, we have even added ice mass.

Doug

Edited by Doug1029
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