Estimated time until Glacier National N.P. will lose its 27 glaciers? (1850's it had 150 of em.) Better yet what year will they change the name of the National Park? My guess? 2010. Yours?

This statement made me wonder about just how this interglacial compares with the past few interglacials. To check it out, I downloaded the Vostok ice core temperature data, based on duterium, from this NOAA
website and plotted it up. The resulting 420,000 year temperature graph shows the current interglacial and 4 previous ones. The data show that 91% of the time over the past 420,000 years the temperature was colder than it is now. Glacials periods last considerably longer than interglacials.

To compare interglacials, I plotted up the current and 3 previous interglacial temperatures vs time on the same graph, by shifting the time scale of the previous interglacials by 120,000, 228,000 and 315,000 years. This is shown here. These data indicate that the warmup time for the previous 3 interglacials was similar to the current one, and they reached temperatures 2 to 3 degrees C higher than the current temperature. One of the interglacials (228,000 ybp) had a very short duration at elevated temperature, but the other two peaked a bit higher than the current one, and slowly drifted through the present temperature before descending again into a glacial period.

This chart suggests that we may be about due for a slide into another glaciation over the next few thousand years. This, of course assumes that the past mechanisms for glaciation are not overridden by current human activity.

It also suggests that 2 or 3 degrees C rise from here would not be unprecidented during an interglacial, although these have in the recent past occurred at the beginning than the end of the interglacial period.

In any case, on this time scale, AGW may be just a blip, because at the current rate we will probably use up all the earth's fossil fuel in a couple of hundred years, possibly staving off another glaciation by a few hundred years.

Seems to me that we better learn to adapt, because continued temperature stability appears to be unlikely based on the Vostok record. Any climate change will cause dislocations, but warming is probably preferable to cooling, from the standpoint of being able to feed the earth's billions.

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What you see in their work and what I see in their work differs significantly, and you should know that by now. What they showed was using only the extreme data from a dataset will get you an extreme result.

About the stalagmites: no kidding, single proxy? What kind of argument is that, Taks. When I point to tree ring studies, they are flawed. When I point to mulitproxy studies that include treering proxies, they are worthless as well, because they use treerings and because the treerings dominate the results. When I use other proxies, they are no good because they are single proxy. I presume that if I pointed to some multiproxy study that did not include treerings, it would still be invalid because you don't like the single proxies behind them. Basically, you just dismiss any study you don't like.
Stalagmite based climate studies don't only measure CO2. They measure the isotopes, chemical mix, pH, ...
See e.g. http://we.vub.ac.be/~dglg/Web/Verhey...e-thesis.html:
This study gets its results from
This pattern can be seen in all stalagmite studies, it seems: isotopes, annual layer thickness, ...
As for the ones I pointed to: the one I did point to in this thread did not measure CO2 but layer thickness.

Ice cores don't show CO2 only either. They show basically the same data as stalagmites, with isotopes, ions, all greenhouse gases, annual layer thickness, ...
See e.g. this page or this page to get an idea of the depth and breadth of the research done with ice cores.

Claiming that "ice cores don't show temperature, they show CO2 only." is very wrong, Taks. Idem dito for stalagmites.

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You have still not shown anywhere that these tree rings a) are wrong (it is obviously not so that if Mann would turn out to be incorrect, which is still not shown, then all tree ring studies would be incorrect: for that to be true, you have to show that tree rings do not represent temperature changes, which you have so far failed to do), and b) dominate those other studies. Putting some words in italics isn't enough.

You also know well enough that you can't "prove" anything in science.

Calling them "pretty graphs" is rather weak as well, and not really a valid scientific objection.

I don't care how they call things or people at Climateaudit, I prefer getting my info from more scientific, objective, and varied sources. I notice you (again) use 'we' to reference a point made there, so I presume you are one of the people behind ClimateAudit? Or who are the we you are talking about otherwise?

And I don't "explain" things "away". I provide evidence for my claims.

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Is the Vostok data contested? Or is it generally agreed to by climatologists? I'm somewhat stunned by it.

I believe it is generally agreed upon. The fit with the more recent and longer (in time) EPICA record (some 500 km away from Vostok) is remarkable. Of course, this may be Antarctica specific (the sudden changes and so on), not global, but it does give a good indication of the last few Ice Ages and interglacials.
This site gives a good overview of what data is already used from this ice core to get a climate (temperature) report. Quite a bit more than only CO2, apparently...

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One question I don't see addressed in the Vostok data is the speed of the temperature change. I've read previously (I can't recall where) that the speed of the change today is quite a bit faster than it was in previous interglacials. Anyone know?

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Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him. ~Albert Einstein~

The ice cores (and most other methods of determining paleotemperature) don't have high enough resolution to pick up very rapid changes, so we can't really say.

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Ice melts. Other data sources linger longer. Information available from ice cores should be a priority to these climatologists. They should be freezing their tushes off doing important research instead of (ok, I'll hint it: chasing "Bigfoots" aka new species sitting in mosquito net hotels paying natives to bring them something new) dilly- dallying around the tropics. Why? Because ice melts.

I think you're mixing climatologists and biologists here, and most biologists don't really believe in Bigfoot. As for chasing other new species: many of them are very rare and may become extinct soon, so if you don't get them now, you'll never get them. Ice melts, species get extinct, and it's both a race against time, but for different scientists.

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Knowledge is a curse, but ignorance is worse

I accept your wise correct. Too much bed-tea lately.

Can icebergs be towed in and melted for drinkable water? South American might need such a plan soon enough. See story of icebergs near Buenos Aires below: http://www.rense.com/general70/gll.htm

Whether the weather is normal or not, major regional problems are on the horizon.

I have merged in the UT Story about the same subject.

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All civilizations become either spacefaring or extinct.~ Carl Sagan ~

Humanity must rise above the Earth, to the top of the atmosphere and beyond, for only then will we fully understand the world in which we live.~Socrates, 500 B.C. ~

Let every man judge according to his own standards, by what he has himself read, not by what others tell him. ~Albert Einstein~

From the "The Journal Of Hispanic Ufology"? Hmmm...

Such would be an extraordinary event. Normally, an iceberg detaching from mainland Antarctica would be embedded in the (somewhat strong) eastward south circumpolar current (SCC), and would drift around the globe along the 50 parallel. It would have a hard time breaking thorugh the SCC and getting too far north along the Argentine Atlantic coast.

In fact, the original article said they were spotted at Carmen de Patagones (some 1000 km south of Buenos Aires). Contrary to what the article states, these are chunks of ice from southern Argentina glaciers (located to the north of the SCC), not from Antarctica.

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Will "Bigfoot" disappear with the glaciers ?

Not the one in Florida. (tee hee) So icebergs can be melted for water supply?

Here's a cause for the melting: http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...104022,00.html (Sun is brighter since 1980's? Atmosphere too clear? Will Texas Panhandle be the next dust bowl? questions I now ponder after reading above.)

I noticed a great deal of discussion of the random reconstruction here when I logged on wanting to let you know that a formal note has been published here:

Stockwell D.R.B., 2006. "Reconstruction of past climate using series with red noise", Australian Institute of Geoscientists Quarterly Newsletter, 83, pp14.

To be accurate this is not peer reviewed. Summary and links to the pdf can be found at my blog page http://landshape.org/enm/?p=30. I am sorry I have not followed the discussion here. From skimming it, it seems that I should highlight the interesting result is that 20% of the FARIMA series correlate with CRU temps, and 40% if you allow negative correlations as well (as MBH98 PCA methods do).

So the frequent correlation has to raise concerns with 'cherry picking' (which is largely due to LTP and short length of the CRU temperature series relative to variation). Steve McIntyre has continued to find high levels of within site variation in response temperature and 'missing' series.

Now the proportion of trees that correlate with temperature in a random sample at a site may be quite important I think, at identifying if the correlation of trees with temperature is entirely coincidental. But also the model of error is important as if you assume i.i.d. errors then virtually 0% would correlate with measured temperatues by chance, but in some other stochastic models, perhaps even more than 20%. So your assumptions are quite important as well.

But the bottom line is that the study does not claim to falsify the temperature reconstructions, just to point out that to use them as support for unprecedented 20th century increase and estimates of the MWP, is a circular argument. It is kind of trivial, its a trivial error, but what isn't trivial is the proportion of spurious correlations that should be expected when doing this kind of study.

My best guess is the most vocal greenhouse warming fans and the most vocal debunkers are wrong most of the time. Most of the ice that has melted is floating ice which causes little or no rise in ocean level. Some warming has occured in most locations of Earth, but so far the average Antarctica ice above sea level in this decade is less than 1% different than any decade 50 to 100 years ago. It is possible that the ice is thickening as warmer temperatures typically mean more snow fall, and Antarctica rarely gets warm enough to melt any ice. The evaporation rate of ice = sublinates increases with temperature, but the evaporation of Antarctica ice is much less than the snow fall. The shore line is sinking in some locations, and rising in others. The net rise of ocean level is tiny and possibly none. Neil

"Really is?" Uh, of course it is!

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The net rise of ocean level is tiny and possibly none.

According to the 2007 IPCC report, the Antarctic is expected to lower sea levels over the next century. Increased temperature leads to increased precipitation over the Antarctic, which will freeze and accumulate as ice because the Antarctic will remain below freezing. This lowering will not overcome the sea level rise caused by thermal expansion and other sources of melted ice.

See chapter 10, section 10.6.4.1:

http://www.ipcc-wg2.org/index.html

Not the point. It's merely used as an indicator of climate instability in a region with a lot of above-sea-level ice that has, for the last few hundred millenia, held that ice in stasis. If the sea-level ice shelves that took many centuries to form suddenly un-form in a short period, it shows rapid warming of the sea in the region.

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"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

If the sea-level ice shelves that took many centuries to form suddenly un-form in a short period, it shows rapid warming of the sea in the region.

As I understand it, the Larsen-A and B ice shelves may not have existed 2000 years and formed after that, perhaps reaching their maxium size during the Little Ice Age. The Larsen-B ice shelf disintegrated in 2002.

Does anyone know: What does our current science consider anomalous: an ice sheet or no ice sheet at that location?

I'm wondering why the melting and break-up of the sea level ice shelves indicates a "rapiid" warming of the seas. Antarctic seas are now about .6 degree C. Sea water freezes about 1.8 degrees C. depending on the salinity. If the sea temperature a few hundred years ago was near the freezing temperature of sea water, a slow and uniform warming would bring us to the current temperature. The .6 degree C. temperature is above the melting temperature of fresh water ice and the floating ice shelves are now melting and breaking up.

Per the British Antarctic Survey:http://www.antarctica.ac.uk/press/pr...ease.php?id=82Well, we were both wrong, then. It was air warmth, not sea warmth, that drove the breakup of the mostly above-sea level ice shelf.

The Larson B shelf is estimated to be 4,000 yers old, according to a Queen's University study:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releas...-isd080305.php

__________________
"If this were play'd upon a stage now, I could condemn it as an improbable fiction."
Shakespeare, Twelfth Night
"The Mayan symbol for "book" looks a lot like a triple hamburger, but I've never seen them claiming it as proof the Mayans had Big Macs." - KaiYeves
"Distance doesn’t matter much in space, where if you just start a thing off with the right kind of shove, sooner or later it will get where you want it to go." -Frederik Pohl, Mining the Oort

Thanks. So that's where the 10,000-year figure comes from. This site references another study of the Larsen ice shelves. I'm not sure how accurately it summarizes it:

http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO.../V9/N50/C1.jsp

Couldn't find 10.6.4.1
report went from 10.6.2 The Himalayan glaciers to 10.7.1 Poverty and illiteracy

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"To excel in physics is to embrace doubt while walking the winding road to clarity." - Brian Greene

Try this, page 816 (18 MB PDF):

http://ipcc-wg1.ucar.edu/wg1/Report/...Print_Ch10.pdf

Glacier ice melts has happened before, were only concerned because now it affects us (Human beings), cant stop mother nature or the earths evolution. On a mission to oblivion anyway ?

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Thank God for magnetism.

Thanks

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"To excel in physics is to embrace doubt while walking the winding road to clarity." - Brian Greene

Ice selves around Antarctica act as barrier against inland glaciers. If they are gone, the flow of glaciers may drastically speed up. So the melting of sea ice is not irrelevant at all. In addition, like is the case with Arctic ice, dark unfrozen sea by collecting heat acts exactly opposite to ice, which reflects almost all of the radiation it gets.

I don't think anyone is seriously excepting that the vast eastern Antarctica could melt, but the western Antarctica is much more unstable and may do something stupid.

Against climate model predictions, snow fall hasn't increased in Antarctica in the last 50 years.

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