Thongchai Thailand

OUR USE OF FOSSIL FUELS IS CAUSING ANTARCTICA TO MELT

1. 1980, GLOBAL WARMING TREND IS HINTED: A comparison of the period 1974-1978 to the period 1930-1934 shows that (a) there is less packed ice fringing Antarctica and that (b) the average surface temperature in the zone of northern melting snows is 0.9 C warmer. These data are evidence of a warming trend. Antarctica is melting due to a global warming trend.
2. 1980, CARBON DIOXIDE COULD CHANGE WEATHER: Since 1850 and the Industrial Revolution we have doubled atmospheric CO2 and if we  continue to burn fossil fuels it could double again in the next fifty years (2030) because fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide faster than plants can absorb them. Warming could cause the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to crack and slide into the ocean to raise sea levels by 16 feet and submerge Florida.
3. 1981, ICE CAP MELTING FORECAST: Institute for Space Studies, NYC: Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could bring a global warming of unprecedented magnitude melting the polar ice caps and flooding lowlands in the next century. The temperature rise could be 4.5 to 8 F depending on the growth in fossil fuel consumption. A doubling of CO2 will cause a temperature rise of 6 F. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is vulnerable to rapid disintegration and melting. A global mean temperature rise of 3.6 F could cause a rise of 9 F at Antarctica melting the Ice Sheet and raising sea levels by 15 to 20 feet and flooding 25% of Florida and Louisiana within a span of 100 years or less.
4. 2001, GLOBAL WARMING MAY TRIGGER ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE A report by the National Research Council (USA) says that global warming may trigger climate changes so abrupt that ecosystems will not be able to adapt. Look for local or short term cooling, floods, droughts, and other unexpected changes. A growing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere due to the use of fossil fuels is to blame. Some regional climates have changed by as much as 10C in 10 years. Antarctica’s largest glaciers are rapidly thinning, and in the last 10 years have lost up to 150 feet of thickness in some places, enough to raise global sea levels by 0.4 mm. Global warming is a real problem and it is getting worse.
5. 2002, ICE SHELF COLLAPSE A WARNING: A piece of ice the size of Rhode island broke off the Larsen ice shelf in Antarctica and within a month it dissipated sending a huge flotsam of ice into the sea. At about the same time an iceberg the size of Delaware broke off the Thwaites Glacier. A few months ago parts of the Ross ice shelf had broken off in a similar way. These events serve as a dramatic reminders that global warming is real and its effects are potentially catastrophic and underscores the urgent need for a binding international agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
6. 2009: CATASTROPHIC WARMING OVER THE WHOLE OF ANTARCTICA: Temperature data 1957-2008 show that the whole of Antarctica including Western Antarctica, the Antarctic Peninsula, and Eastern Antarctica, is warming due to CO2 emissions from fossil fuels.
7. 2009: MELTING OF ANTARCTICA MORE SEVERE THAN PREVIOUSLY THOUGHT: Climate scientists say that the melting of Antarctica is more severe than “previously thought” because the melt is not limited to the Antarctic Peninsula but extends to West Antarctica as well.
8. 2009: THE WILKINS ICE SHELF IS COLLAPSING: Climate scientists say that the Wilkins Ice Shelf collapse is caused by warming of the Antarctic Peninsula due to man-made “global climate change”. If all of the land based ice in Antarctica melted it would raise the sea level by 80 meters
9. 2009: ONE HUNDRED ICEBERGS BREAK OFF FROM ANTARCTICA: Human caused global warming is causing havoc in Antarctica with potentially incalculable results. Over one hundred icebergs broke off and a huge flotilla of them are floating up to New Zealand
10. 2009: ANTARCTICA TO LOSING BILLIONS OF TONS OF ICE: Our carbon dioxide emissions are causing the East Antarctic ice shelf to lose 57 billion tonnes of ice per year and that if CO2 emissions are not reduced this process could raise sea levels by 5 meters.
11. 2019: Is Thwaites Glacier doomed? Scientists race against time to find out. How quickly will Antarctica’s massive Thwaites Glacier melt, and what will that mean for global sea levels and coastal cities? Researchers recently spent several weeks studying Thwaites as part of a five-year, international effort to try to answer those pressing questions.

THIS POST IS A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF VARIOUS CLAIMS MADE BY CLIMATE SCIENCE ABOUT THE IMPACT OF CLIMATE CHANGE ON ANTARCTICA AND OF THE EVIDENCE FOR AGW CLAIMED TO BE FOUND IN DATA FROM ANTARCTICA.

IT IS BASED ON THE ANTARCTICA SECTION OF A LECTURE BY JAMES EDWARD KAMIS  [LINK]

RELATED POST ON THE SEA LEVEL RISE OBSESSION WITH ANTARCTICA [LINK]  

1. Antarctica is broken into two pieces. On the west is West Antarctica that constitutes 20% of Antarctica. The upper portion of West Antarctica forms a thumb. It’s called the Antarctic Peninsula. The remaining 80% of Antarctica is called East Antarctica. The image below shows a NASA graph that reflects ice melting on the entire continent from 1995 to 2015. It is here shown as a proxy for ice melting denominated as millimeters of sea level rise due to meltwater. Note that West Antarctica, inclusive of the Antarctic Peninsula, the 20% portion of the continent, accounts for all of the continent’s ice loss. East Antarctica, the much larger 80%, is actually gaining ice. This melt graph was created in 2015 by Dr. H. Jay Zwally is Chief Cryospheric Scientist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Project Scientist for the Ice Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite. 
2. 
3. The lopsided melt data raises this question: why is all the melt concentrated in 20% of the continent while the other 80% gains ice? The answer is found in the University of Washington 50-year average surface temperature map. It was generated in 2009 by Dr. Eric Steig – Earth and Space Sciences – University of Washington. It’s validity was hotly debated for many years. However, since that time, it has been proven correct by two more modern studies. NASA’s skin temperature map and British Antarctic Survey’s temperature map.
4. The surface temperature map that Dr. Steig made represents the temperature of the upper few meters of ice and sediment and does not reflect the temperature of the atmosphere. Therefore, the temperature we see reflects the heat emitted from the Antarctic continent. This map was very controversial when it was first published mostly because it did not show a uniform temperature profile expected from uniform heat flow across the whole continent. Instead it showed a sharply defined red hot area in West Antarctica with a very sharp transition to the moderately warming or not warming East Antarctica.
5. The question is why is there a sharply defined warming area in Antarctica? This is the answer. This map shows in black hatched lines the largest geological feature in Antarctica. It is the 4,000-mile-long and 700-mile wide feature called the West Antarctic Rift. This feature is actually in the process of ripping the entire Antarctic continent apart. It is home to 149 land volcanoes, some sub-sea volcanoes, and a 620,000 square-mile hotspot. We will now zoom in on four selected areas along this giant rift for a closer look at heat flows.
6. In the image below, the left frame shows the northwest extension of the West Antarctic Rift and its major fault traces in red as the fault traces continue into the ocean. Also on here are some yellow circles. Those are active volcanoes with some of them recently erupting. The larger the circle the more active the volcano. So first we’ll talk about the South Georgia Island seen in the upper right slide where you can see that in September 29, 2016 three volcanoes erupted simultaneously indicating that this is a very active portion of the rift. On the lower right slide is the May 1 2016 eruption of Mt Curry which is located in the South Sandwich Islands. This eruption emitted tremendous amounts of volcanic ash onto the surrounding glacial areas of ice that disrupted penguin migration. But the penguins adapted. They didn’t die, and I think this is kind of an interesting aspect of this eruption. The Galapagos Islands are volcanic and Charles Darwin did his research there. He discovered that the geological eruptions and changes on these islands had a strong influence on the extinction or the preservation of specific species there. Based on this he developed his theory of natural selection. That’s kind of what’s happening in this segment of the Antarctic Rift.
7. The South Shetland Island. The image below shows the South Shetland Island portion of the Rift. Again, you can see the long linear string of volcanoes where there is six of them, one very large, it’s called the South Shetland Island specifically. This area contains one of the most active volcanoes in all of Antarctica. It’s called the Deception Island Collapse Caldera. A collapse caldera is a huge volcano that erupts so violently that the center of it collapses. It is often filled with fresh water but in this case because it is so close to the ocean, this huge hole is filled with sea water. Here there’s a little opening in this large caldera so that eco tourists can come in and visit it. On the right slide is the interior of the collapse caldera where the tourists are soaking in steaming hot water on black volcanic sand. The reason for the steaming hot water is that this caldera is still active. It is one of the first stops in visits to Antarctica. 
8. The West Antarctic Rift (WAR) is shown in the image below: It consists of a number of rift valleys between East and West Antarctica. A rift valley is a long narrow deep and steep valley. The WAR includes part of Byrd area of West Antarctica. The Byrd area is the main portion of the WAR. It is studied in terms of its three geologically interesting regions. These are the Hudson Mountains & Mount Takahe volcanic regions and the Pine Island Glacial Valley.
9. Hudson Mountains: Research by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS 2008) shows that this region suffered a a massive sub-glacial volcanic eruption way back in time of Jesus Christ (2.2KYBP) and caused this glacial area to become covered with volcanic ash which eventually became sandwiched under a subsequent layer of glacial ice. From the thickness of the sandwiched volcanic ash section, the BAS determined that this must have been the largest Antarctic volcanic eruption in the Holocene.
10. Mount Takahe: The two red circles in the graphic marks the location of two huge volcanoes that emerged through the ice. BAS research shows that Mt Takahe erupted continuously in a 200-year volcanic orgasm about 17.7KYBP, toward the end of the last glaciation. A graphical representation of the last glaciation appears in a related post [LINK] . According to research by the DRI, these eruptions altered the ocean currents and the climate of the Southern Hemisphere extending from the South Pole to the Tropics (Nevada DRI, 2013, [LINK] ); but these considerations are not found in the popular versions of climate science.
11. The Pine Island Glacier: This is a long narrow glacier adjacent to the Hudson Mountains volcanic region. It is a creation of the main fault that runs through the WAR. For many years, the Pine Island Glacier has been for a long time held up as a victim of AGW and it served as a vivid case study in the public eye of the concern that man made climate change was melting glaciers [LINK] . But it was more than that. It was used by climate science in research papers and in news media presentations both as proof of AGW and also as a vivid visual rationale for climate action to prevent catastrophic sea level rise and for the longer term, to save the planet from the effects of AGW.
12. However, in 2018, researchers at the National Science Foundation (NSF) made a surprising discovery that jolted the climate science community. They found an active volcano beneath the Pine Island Glacier that was erupting. It then became evident that the glacial melt that had been attributed to AGW and held up as a climate change poster child to the point of proving AGW, was actually the creation of an erupting sub-glacial volcano.
13. On the right side of the map above, is the Pine Island Glacier catchment basin outlined in blue. The red and purple circles are locations of volcanoes that have been identified under the glacier. Note also the location of the catchment basin of the Thwaites Glacier with red circles identifying active volcanoes underneath the glacier.
14. It has been repeatedly reported in the media and also claimed in scientific peer reviewed papers that they have discovered a huge air cavity beneath the ice and above the bedrock surface in the Thwaites Glacier that is evidence of the impact of AGW on the Thwaites Glacier. However, since we know that there is an erupting volcano beneath Pine Island Glacier, it is reasonable to conclude that the cavity found by scientists was created by an eruption of one of the 40 volcanoes known to exist underneath the Thwaites Glacier.
15. The Marie Byrd Mantle Plume Hotspot is outlined in red in the image below. A mantle plume hotspot is a large area of magma that comes up from the mantle of the inner earth, goes up through layers of rock until obstructed when it spreads out into a mushroom shape over a widespread area. If it is under a sufficient pressure, the magma can break through to the atmosphere as a volcanic eruption. The shaded red areas on the map are graphical representations of NASA ice melt data from 1992-2019. Red shaded areas identify locations of melting and the darker the red color, the more intense the melting. These red areas are found close to the edge of the Marie Byrd Mantle Plume. These data suggest that the mantle plume is the cause of the observed ice melt.  
16. An oddity about the Marie Byrd Mantle Plume area is that a rise in elevation has been recorded over a multi-decadal time scale. These data indicate that the bedrock is being pushed up by the underlying magma and that in turn is causing the whole of this glacial area to rise. This effect is a typical feature of active mantle plumes and therefore the elevation rise data provide further evidence of a mantle plume beneath. An alternate explanation for the rise in elevation is “glacial rebound”. Glacial rebound is the idea that when ice melts and meltwater runs off it reduces the pressure on the underlying structure and causes it to rise. However, in this case, the uplift is too large to be explained entirely in terms of glacial rebound.
17. The Mount Erebus Volcanic Complex: On the right side of the image above are shown the Pluton Rich Hotspot and the Mount Erebus Volcanic Complex. The image below shows volcanic eruptions in the Mount Erebus Volcanic Complex. Mount Erebus is part of a large and very active volcanic platform 240km x 440km, more than 100,000 square km in area. Mt Erebus itself is a 3,790 meter high StratoVolcano. A strato-volcano is a conical volcano consisting of multiple alternating layers of lava and ash. It has been going through multiple mild eruptions over a long period of time and is currently active. Research by the University of Indiana shows that the magma chamber below fueling these eruptions is migrating upwards, and has moved from deep below the earth to near the summit of Mt Erebus. This rise reflects the magnitude of the pressure below and that the Mount Erebus Volcanic Complex is a very active volcanic are. The right frame of the image below shows the location of the Mount Erebus in a larger geographical area in the context of the two other volcanoes in the region. The black vertical line on the right is the major eastern fault of the Antarctic Rift. Also in this image we see large chunks of ice breaking up in the water of the bay. Near the bottom of the image is the Nansen Glacier that has been rapidly retreating. In the AGW literature of climate science and in the media, this rapid glacial retreat has been attributed to AGW with the complimentary claim that climate action will slow and halt this retreat and its sea level rise consequences. Yet, considering the location of this glacier on an active fault and and in an active volcanic area, the atmospheric cause seems far fetched and highly unlikely particularly so because of the highly localized and non uniform distribution of these melt events. The known distribution of geothermal heat provides a more rational explanation for the observed retreat of the Nansen Glacier. 
18. Kerguelen Plateau Seamounts, Hydrothermal Vents, Spreading Center Rift (image below):  The Kerguelen Plateau is an offshore volcanic platform in East Antarctica. It is one of the largest igneous provinces in the world. A large  igneous province (LIP) is a gigantic collection of igneous rocks brought up to the surface by magma flows from the mantle. The Kerguelen ocean-floor plateau along with its few islands cover more than 1.2 million square kilometers and rise more than 2,000 meters above the ocean basin. Also on this plateau are volcanic islands, ocean floor volcanoes, and hundreds of ocean floor hydrothermal vents.  A 2016 study of the Kerguelen Plateau by the Australian Antarctic Division concluded that this area is very geologically active. They found iron enrichment of sea water and attributed that to emissions from the thousands of hydrothermal vents beneath. They also concluded that animal migration patterns that had been attributed to AGW by the British Antarctic Survey (BAS) are better explained in terms of volcanic activity. The BAS research on animal migrations was initiated by reports from fishermen that marine animal migration patterns had changed dramatically and affected their fishing. They reported that sea lions and other animals were moving to areas where they had never before been seen. The BAS interpreted these data from fishermen as evidence of a possible man made ecological disaster caused by climate change. But when their research got underway and they got to the Kerguelen Plateau they saw that a volcano on one of the volcanic islands was actively erupting. They launched a self guided mini-submarine to take data near the erupting volcano. The sub found hundreds of active hydrothermal vents emitting iron-rich fluids. These data eventually forced them to change their original AGW theory for the animal migrations to include heat flows from terrestrial and ocean floor volcanoes and hydrothermal vents. 
19. The 2017 Weddell Sea Ice Melt Hole:  In 2017, a melt hole appeared very suddenly in an offshore area on the North side of East Antarctica. The melt hole can be seen as a blue spot on the left frame of the image below. The right frame, the sea ice area is shown with white hashed markers. The media became energized by this discovery and reported that “A MYSTERIOUS HOLE as big as the state of Maine has been spotted in Antarctica’s winter sea ice cover”. The location of the melt hole is indicated with a white ellipsoidal marker in the right frame of the image below. The melt hole was attributed to changes in ocean currents and ocean heat content and thereby ascribed to AGW without consideration of geological factors. Outlined in red in the same area as the melt hole is the location of a volcanic platform called the Maude Volcanic Platform. It is an active but sporadic source of heat flow. There was a pulse of heat flow in 1976 and another in 2017 with both pulses creating melt holes. These known and verified heat pulses explain the melt hole formations in these two years without the need for elaborate assumptions about changes in ocean currents and ocean heat content.          
20. The Pacific Ocean’s Ring of Fire:  The Ring of Fire is a horseshoe shaped region in the Pacific Ocean that is the most active geological area on earth. As can be seen in the image below, the Ring of Fire extends down to Antarctica. The volcanoes discussed above lie along the Pacific Ring of Fire. In fact, the West Antarctic Rift, discussed above, is shown in a red hashed area in the Ring of Fire image below. The density of active volcanoes in the West Antarctic Rift is the same as then in the Ring of Fire.                                                                                                         
21. SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION: Antarctica is geologically active. It is not an inert platform that holds ice but a chemically and thermally charged system. Heat flow and fluid flows from its geological features actively alter temperature and chemistry of the ocean, and cause melting of glacial ice. It is not possible to interpret Antarctica’s ice melt dynamics purely in terms atmospheric phenomena specifically with respect to the AGW mechanism having to do with changes in atmospheric CO2 concentration. 

BACKGROUND INFORMATION

1. Powerful and significant climate effect of geological forces has been greatly underestimated and under-appreciated and has remained hidden for several reasons. The first reason is remoteness. About 71% of earth is covered by oceans with an average depth of 14,000 feet. The ocean is home to most of the big fault boundaries that border continents and ocean segments. They are known as plate boundaries. Another 11% of earth is covered by polar ice caps. Therefore, 82% of the earth’s surface is remote. Much of it is glacial ice as much as five thousand feet high. Some areas of the ocean there is covered with very thick sea ice. These areas are very remote. Not just oceans but the polar ice caps also contain some very large fault systems beneath them. The second reason, after remoteness, that geological features haven’t been appreciated is lack of monitoring. These remote areas do not have systems that record on a regular basis, temperature, carbon dioxide, methane, iron, mercury, etc, nor emissions from these geological features. As a result, there is very little known about them.
2. The last reason is an atmosphere bias.  The term “atmospheric bias” refers to the fact that scientists look at the various atmospheric datasets that are readily available to them, and they do find correlations between atmospheric parameters and climate patterns and climate events. But correlations don’t always represent a causal relationship because correlations exist among multiple effects of the same driving force. The atmospheric bias, that can be described in general terms as a “data availability bias”, has acted to hide the important influence of geological features.
3. Increased tectonic activity, either locally or globally, equates to more heat and chemically charged heat in fluids released from active geological features into oceans, sub-glacial polar regions, and into the atmosphere. This altered heat and fluid input has in the past, and still to this day, acts to affect earth’s climate and climate related events. There are many connections between geology and climate.
4. Antarctica is still under intense evaluation and research. This presentation is the best information available to be at this time but not claimed to be absolute truth that cannot be questioned. It is very convincing but not claimed to be absolute truth and therefore subject to change as new data become available. There are still things to be discovered about the geology of Antarctica and about Antarctica in general. Antarctica is very large.

1. An important component of climate change alarmism is that anthropogenic global warming (AGW) caused by fossil fuel emissions since the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) will melt polar ice and cause catastrophic sea level rise. This scenario likely derives from paleo data about the prior interglacial, the Eemian, for which very violent sea level changes are recorded. Sea level rise of as much as 5 to 9 meters are reported and attributed to a complete disintegration of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (Details in related post on the Eemian Interglacial [LINK] ).
2. Violent sea level rise events in the current interglacial, the Holocene, occurred as a series of “meltwater pulses” in the earlier part of this interglacial thousands of years ago. These meltwater pulses are described in some detail in the bibliography included below. The timing of the meltwater pulses is depicted graphically in the chart above. The timing indicates that violent sea level changes due to ice melt and meltwater pulses occurred in the initial transition from glaciation to interglacial.
3. What we see in the bibliography below is repeated but failed attempts to relate the meltwater pulses to disintegration of polar ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica. In the end the attribution of the meltwater pulses remain as non-polar ice sheets such as the Laurentide. Since the melt itself did not occur in pulses, the pulsed sea level rise is thought to have been caused by accumulation of meltwater in large lakes with sudden discharge to the sea when the barrier between the St Lawrence and the Atlantic suddenly gave way.
4. An alternative but controversial explanation is offered below at the end of the bibliography by RANDAL CARLSON [LINK]  in terms of an explosive disintegration and melt of the Laurentide ice sheet caused by asteroids or comets. Mr Carlson claims that his extra-terrestrial theory of meltwater pulses provides a more accurate explanation of the Missoula Floods although it is not clear how a single explosion can explain multiple pulses.
5. A bibliography of the Missoula Floods and the Randal Carlson’s extraterrestrial theory of meltwater pulses are provided below. It should be mentioned that the Carslon theory is not taken seriously by paleo climate researchers particularly since there is no evidence of such an extraterrestrial event other than the effect it is supposed to have caused.
6. The important thesis of this post is that the violent and catastrophic ice sheet melt and sea level rise events of the Holocene that we are supposed to fear have already occurred. These events caused the very low sea levels of the glacial maximum when one could walk from Siberia to Alaska through Beringia, to rise to levels with which we are familiar today. Although the subsequent duration of the interglacial does show violent and chaotic cycles of cooling and warming (described in a related post [LINK] ), they do not include the kind of catastrophic changes in sea level seen in the early Holocene’s transition from glaciation.
7. However, it remains an objective of climate science to find ways to describe the transition from the LIA to the current warm period in terms of early Holocene and early Eemian catastrophic sea level rise scenarios. These attempts have mostly failed except for rare events such as the collapse of the Larsen B Ice Shelf in 2002.
8. Yet, as described in a related post [LINK] , localized events such as the collapse of the Larsen B ice shelf have more rational explanations in terms of geothermal heat. West Antarctica is geologically active and localized melt events are best described in those terms. An ice shelf collapse can cause sea level rise because its source glacier flows faster to the sea in its absence  although, eventually it will construct a new ice shelf. Yet, in spite of the reality of Holocene sea level rise described above and in the bibliography below, climate science appears to be obsessed with the catastrophic sea level rise possibilities of melting polar ice. This fantasy of climate science is described in detail in a related post [LINK] .

[LIST OF POSTS ON THIS SITE]

EHSLR BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Ellison, Joanna C., and David R. Stoddart. “Mangrove ecosystem collapse during predicted sea-level rise: Holocene analogues and implications.” Journal of Coastal research(1991): 151-165.  Review of the stratigraphic record of mangrove ecosystems during sea- level changes of the Holocene shows that low islands will be particularly vulnerable to the loss of mangrove ecosystems during the rises of relative sea-level projected for the next 50 years. Mangrove ecosystems in these locations could keep up with a sea-level rise of up to 8-9 cm/100 years, but at rates of over 12 cm/100 years could not persist. This is due to low rates of sediment accumulation, with limited sources from outside the mangrove zone, such as from rivers or soil erosion sources. Other factors contributing to mangrove persistence are the primary production rate of forests, shoreline erosion due to deeper and more turbulent water and the frequency and intensity of tropical storms.
2. Clark, Peter U., et al. “Origin of the first global meltwater pulse following the last glacial maximum.” Paleoceanography 11.5 (1996): 563-577.  Well‐dated sea level records show that the glacioeustatic rise following the last glacial maximum was characterized by two or possibly three brief intervals of rapid sea level rise separating periods with much lower rates. These very high rates of sea level rise indicate periods of exceptionally rapid deglaciation of remaining ice sheets. The Laurentide Ice Sheet is commonly targeted as the source of the first, and largest, of the meltwater pulses (mwp‐IA between ∼14,200 (12,200 ¹⁴C years B.P.) and 13,700 years ago (11,700 ¹⁴C years B.P.)). In all oceanic records of deglaciation of the former northern hemisphere ice sheets that we review, only those from the Gulf of Mexico and the Bermuda Rise show evidence of low δ¹⁸O values at the time of mwp‐IA, identifying the southern Laurentide Ice Sheet as a potential source for mwp‐IA. We question this source for mwp‐IA, however, because (1) ice sheet models suggest that this sector of the ice sheet contributed only a fraction (<10%) of the sea level needed for mwp‐IA, (2) melting this sector of the ice sheet at the necessary rate to explain mwp‐IA is physically implausible, and (3) ocean models predict a much stronger thermohaline response to the inferred freshwater pulse out of the Mississippi River into the North Atlantic than is recorded. This leaves the Antarctic Ice Sheet as the only other ice sheet capable of delivering enough sea level to explain mwp‐IA, but there are currently no well‐dated high‐resolution records to document this hypothesis. These conclusions suggest that reconstructions of the Laurentide Ice Sheet in the ICE‐4G model, which are constrained to match the sea level record, may be too low for time periods younger than 15,000 years ago. Furthermore, δ¹⁸O records from the Gulf of Mexico show variable fluxes of meltwater from the southern margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet which can be traced to the opening and closing of eastward draining glacial‐lake outlets associated with surging ice sheet behavior. These variable fluxes through eastern outlets were apparently sufficient to affect formation of North Atlantic Deep Water, thus underscoring the sensitivity of this process to changes in freshwater forcing.
3. Bard, Edouard, et al. “Deglacial sea-level record from Tahiti corals and the timing of global meltwater discharge.” Nature382.6588 (1996): 241.  The timing of the last deglaciation is important to our understanding of the dynamics of large ice sheets and their effects on the Earth’s surface. Moreover, the disappearance of the glacial ice sheets was responsible for dramatic increases in freshwater fluxes to the oceans, which probably disturbed the ocean’s thermohaline circulation and, hence, global climate. Sea-level increases bear witness to the melting of continental ice sheets, but only two such records—from Barbados and New Guinea corals—have been accurately dated. But these corals overlie active subduction zones, where tectonic movements are large and discontinuous (especially in New Guinea), so the apparent sea-level records may be contaminated by a complex tectonic component. Here we date fossil corals from Tahiti, which is far from plate boundaries (and thus is likely to be tectonically relatively stable) and remote from the locations of large former ice sheets. The resulting record indicates a large sea-level jump shortly before 13,800 calendar years BP, which corresponds to meltwater pulse 1A in the Barbados coral records^8,9. The timing of this event is more accurately constrained in the Tahiti record, revealing that the meltwater pulse coincides with a short and intense climate cooling event^12–15 that followed the initiation of the Bølling–Allerød warm period^12–16, but preceded the Younger Dryas cold event by about 1,000 years.
4. Josenhans, Heiner, et al. “Early humans and rapidly changing holocene sea levels in the queen Charlotte islands-Hecate strait, british Columbia, Canada.” Science 277.5322 (1997): 71-74.  Marine cores from the continental shelf edge of British Columbia (Canada) demonstrate that sea level at the shelf edge was 153 meters below present 14,000 calendar years ago and more than 30 meters lower than the maximum eustatic low of −120 meters. Dated artifacts, including stone tools, indicate that humans occupied this region by at least 10,200 calendar years before present (B.P.). Local sea level rose rapidly (5 centimeters per year) during the period of early human occupation as a result of eustatic sea-level rise and glacio-isostatic forebulge movement. This shelf edge site was first elevated and then subsided. The exposed shelf edge was available for human occupation and may have served as a migration route during times of lowered sea levels between 13,500 and 9500 ¹⁴C years B.P.
5. Toscano, Marguerite A., and Joyce Lundberg. “Early Holocene sea-level record from submerged fossil reefs on the southeast Florida margin.” Geology 26.3 (1998): 255-258.  Massive fossil (outlier) reefs are preserved seaward of the modern shelf and reef tract along the southeast Florida margin. Thermal ionization mass-spectrometric (TIMS) U-Th dating of 16 pristine Acropora palmata and head corals cored from two transects document early Holocene reef growth from 8.9 to 5.0 ka, from approximately −13.5 to −7 m MSL (mean sea level). These samples fill a gap in the Florida Keys sea-level database and clarify the timing of a significant decrease in the rate of sea-level rise. A portion of this interval, represented by a gap in the Caribbean record of A. palmata reefs, has been interpreted as reef drowning during an inferred catastrophic sea-level rise event of >45 mm/yr, or a 6.5 m rise between 7.6 and 7.2 ka, attributed to West Antarctic Ice Sheet instability and changes in marine ice extent between 8 and 7 ka. Continuous in situ shallow-water reef growth in Florida during this interval precludes the occurrence of exceedingly rapid rates of sea-level rise and is consistent with the North Atlantic record of deglaciation from 9 to 7 ka. Gaps in the early Holocene sea-level records for Florida and the Caribbean are thus more likely to be artifacts of limited sampling and/or core coverage, and not necessarily a result of drowning.
6. Zheng, Yan, et al. “Intensification of the northeast Pacific oxygen minimum zone during the Bølling‐Allerød warm period.” Paleoceanography and Paleoclimatology 15.5 (2000): 528-536. Although climate records from several locations around the world show nearly synchronous and abrupt changes, the nature of the inferred teleconnection is still poorly understood. On the basis of preserved laminations and molybdenum enrichments in open margin sediments we demonstrate that the oxygen content of northeast Pacific waters at 800 rn depth during the B611ing-Aller6d warm period (15-13 kyr) was greatly reduced. Existing oxygen isotopic records of benthic and planktonic foraminifera suggest that this was probably due to suppressed ventilation at higher latitudes of the North Pacific. Comparison with ventilation records for the North Atlantic indicates an antiphased pattern of convection relative to the North Pacific over the past 22 kyr, perhaps due to variations in water vapor transport across Central America.
7. Yu, Zicheng, and Ulrich Eicher. “Three amphi-Atlantic century-scale cold events during the Bølling-Allerød warm period.” Géographie physique et Quaternaire 55.2 (2001): 171-179.  Oxygen isotope composition of carbonates in the sediments of Crawford Lake, southern Canada, reveals multiple climatic events during the last deglaciation, including the Bølling warming, intra-Allerød cold period, Younger Dryas, Preboreal Oscillation, and early-Holocene 8.2-ka cooling. Here we present a high-resolution record (~50-yr sampling interval) of oxygen isotopes from this site during the Bølling-Allerød warm period and discuss its significance by comparing it with other records around the North Atlantic. These new data show three century-scale cold events, including the intra-Bølling cold period, Older Dryas, and intra-Allerød cold period. These climatic events correlate well in sequence and relative magnitude with those found in Greenland ice cores, European lacustrine sediments, and Atlantic Ocean sediments. Three similar oscillations in glaciochemical records from GISP2 ice core imply shift in atmospheric circulation patterns. The amphi-Atlantic distribution of these climate events suggests that these events likely originated from the North Atlantic Ocean and that climatic signals were transmitted through the atmosphere
8. Clark, Peter U., et al. “Sea-level fingerprinting as a direct test for the source of global meltwater pulse IA.” Science 295.5564 (2002): 2438-2441.  The ice reservoir that served as the source for the meltwater pulse IA remains enigmatic and controversial. We show that each of the melting scenarios that have been proposed for the event produces a distinct variation, or fingerprint, in the global distribution of meltwater. We compare sea-level fingerprints associated with various melting scenarios to existing sea-level records from Barbados and the Sunda Shelf and conclude that the southern Laurentide Ice Sheet could not have been the sole source of the meltwater pulse, whereas a substantial contribution from the Antarctic Ice Sheet is consistent with these records.
9. Kienast, Markus, et al. “Synchroneity of meltwater pulse 1a and the Bølling warming: new evidence from the South China Sea.” Geology 31.1 (2003): 67-70.  A twofold decrease in long-chain n-alcane (n-nonacosane) concentrations in a downcore record from the northern South China Sea indicates a rapid drop in the supply of terrigenous organic matter to the open South China Sea during the last deglaciation, paralleled by an equally rapid increase in sea-surface temperatures, corresponding with the Bølling warming at 14.7 ka. The sudden drop in terrigenous organic matter delivery to this marginal basin is interpreted to reflect a short-term response of local rivers to rapid sea-level rise, strongly implying that the Bølling warming and the onset of meltwater pulse (MWP) 1a are synchronous. This phase relation contrasts with the widely cited onset of this MWP 1a ca. 14 ka, and implies that previous studies postulating a weakening of deep-water formation in the North Atlantic due to massive meltwater discharge during MWP 1a need to be reevaluated.
10. Weaver, Andrew J., et al. “Meltwater pulse 1A from Antarctica as a trigger of the Bølling-Allerød warm interval.” Science299.5613 (2003): 1709-1713.  Meltwater pulse 1A (MWP-1A) was a prominent feature of the last deglaciation. iT led to a sea-level rise of ∼20 meters ≈500 years. Concurrent with mwp-1A was the onset of the Bølling-Allerød interstadial event (14,600YBP), which marked the termination of the last glacial period. Previous studies have been unable to reconcile a warm Northern Hemisphere with mwp-1A originating from the Laurentide or Fennoscandian ice sheets. With the use of a climate model of intermediate complexity, we demonstrate that with mwp-1A originating from the Antarctic Ice Sheet, consistent with recent sea-level fingerprinting inferences, the strength of North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) formation increases, thereby warming the North Atlantic region and providing an explanation for the onset of the Bølling-Allerød warm interval. The established mode of active NADW formation is then able to respond to subsequent freshwater forcing from the Laurentide and Fennoscandian ice sheets, setting the stage for the Younger Dryas cold period.
11. Webster, Jody M., et al. “Drowning of the− 150 m reef off Hawaii: a casualty of global meltwater pulse 1A?.” Geology32.3 (2004): 249-252.  We present evidence that the drowning of the −150 m coral reef around Hawaii was caused by rapid sea-level rise associated with meltwater pulse 1A (MWP-1A) during the last deglaciation. New U/Th and ¹⁴C accelerator mass spectrometry dates, combined with reinterpretation of existing radiometric dates, constrain the age of the coral reef to 15.2–14.7 ka (U/Th age), indicating that reef growth persisted for 4.3 k.y. following the end of the Last Glacial Maximum at 19 ka. The drowning age of the reef is roughly synchronous with the onset of MWP-1A between 14.7 and 14.2 ka. Dates from coralline algal material range from 14 to 10 cal ka (calibrated radiocarbon age), 1–4 k.y. younger than the coral ages. A paleoenvironmental reconstruction incorporating all available radiometric dates, high-resolution bathymetry, dive observations, and coralgal paleobathymetry data indicates a dramatic rise in sea level around Hawaii ca. 14.7 ka. Paleowater depths over the reef crest increased rapidly above a critical depth (30–40 m), drowning the shallow reef-building Porites corals and causing a shift to deep-water coralline algal growth, preserved as a crust on the drowned reef crest.
12. Peltier, W. R. “On the hemispheric origins of meltwater pulse 1a.” Quaternary Science Reviews 24.14-15 (2005): 1655-1671. During the glacial–interglacial transition that began subsequent to the Last Glacial Maximum approximately 21,000 calendar years ago, globally averaged (eustatic) sea-level rose by approximately 120 m as climate warmed to its current (Holocene) state. This rise of relative sea-level (RSL) did not occur smoothly, however, but was characterized by the occurrence of one or more episodes of extremely rapid increase. The most extreme of these events has come to be referred to as meltwater pulse 1a, and was initially identified in the coral based record of RSL history from the island of Barbados in the Caribbean Sea. Although it has usually been assumed that this episode of rapid RSL rise was derivative of a partial collapse of the northern hemisphere ice sheets, it has recently been suggested that this pulse could have originated in a dramatic melt-back of the Antarctic Ice Sheet. In this paper the arguments presented in favour of the southern hemisphere source are revisited in order to assess the plausibility of this Antarctic scenario. Based upon the analyses presented, it is concluded that the evidence previously provided in support of the southern hemisphere scenario is in fact unable to rule out an entirely northern hemisphere source for the meltwater pulse 1a. Since explicit evidence does exist that both the Laurentide and Fennoscandian ice sheets contributed to this event and that Antarctic ice sheet melting occurred significantly later, the southern hemisphere appears not to have been a prime mover of northern hemisphere events.
13. Hill, T. M., et al. “Pre-Bølling warming in Santa Barbara Basin, California: surface and intermediate water records of early deglacial warmth.” Quaternary Science Reviews 25.21-22 (2006): 2835-2845.  A new piston core from Santa Barbara Basin, California provides evidence of the timing, magnitude, and character of deglaciation, including evidence of warming prior to Termination IA. IMAGES Site MD02-2503 (570 m water depth) consists of intermittently laminated hemipelagic sediments extending to Interstadial (D/O) event 6 (∼34 ka), that accumulated at ∼135 cm/ka. During the deglacial episode (16.75–10 ka), δ¹⁸O values decreased by 3.2‰ in the planktonic species Globigerina bulloides, indicating a total warming of 8–9 °C recorded by surface-dwelling foraminifera (inferred by removing the 1‰ influence of ice volume change). Similarly, benthic species (Bolivina argentea and Uvigerina peregrina) record a 1.65‰ δ¹⁸O decrease across the deglacial, interpreted as a 2–3 °C warming at upper intermediate depths. δ¹⁸O values of both planktonic and benthics indicate that surface and intermediate waters began to warm ∼2 ka prior to Termination IA, beginning at ∼16.5 ka. Intermediate water warming exhibits similar structure and synchronous timing with surface waters. These findings are consistent with a growing number of records from around the globe that exhibit pre-Bølling warming prior to Termination IA, and extends the record of such processes to the northern Pacific.
14. Bondevik, Stein, et al. “Changes in North Atlantic radiocarbon reservoir ages during the Allerød and Younger Dryas.” Science 312.5779 (2006): 1514-1517. Estimates of the radiocarbon age of seawater are required in correlations between marine and terrestrial records of the late Quaternary climate. We radiocarbon-dated marine shells and terrestrial plant remains deposited in two bays on Norway’s west coast between 11,000 and 14,000 years ago, a time of large and abrupt climatic changes that included the Younger Dryas (YD) cold episode. The radiocarbon age difference between the shells and the plants showed that sea surface reservoir ages increased from 400 to 600 years in the early YD, stabilized for 900 years, and dropped by 300 years within a century across the YD-Holocene transition.
15. Stanford, Jennifer D., et al. “Timing of meltwater pulse 1a and climate responses to meltwater injections.” Paleoceanography21.4 (2006).  The temporal relationship between meltwater pulse 1a (mwp‐1a) and the climate history of the last deglaciation remains a subject of debate. By combining the Greenland Ice Core Project δ¹⁸O ice core record on the new Greenland ice core chronology 2005 timescale with the U/Th‐dated Barbados coral record, we conclusively derive that mwp‐1a did not coincide with the sharp Bølling warming but instead with the abrupt cooling of the Older Dryas. To evaluate whether there is a relationship between meltwater injections, North Atlantic Deep Water (NADW) formation, and climate change, we present a high‐resolution record of NADW flow intensity from Eirik Drift through the last deglaciation. It indicates only a relatively minor 200‐year weakening of NADW flow, coincident with mwp‐1a. Our compilation of records also indicates that during Heinrich event 1 and the Younger Dryas there were no discernible sea level rises, and yet these periods were characterized by intense NADW slowdowns/shutdowns. Clearly, deepwater formation and climate are not simply controlled by the magnitude or rate of meltwater addition. Instead, our results emphasize that the location of meltwater pulses may be more important, with NADW formation being particularly sensitive to surface freshening in the Arctic/Nordic Seas.
16. Bird, Michael I., et al. “An inflection in the rate of early mid-Holocene eustatic sea-level rise: A new sea-level curve from Singapore.” Estuarine, Coastal and Shelf Science 71.3-4 (2007): 523-536. This study presents a sea-level curve from ∼9500 to ∼6500 cal BP for the farfield location of Singapore, on the Sunda Shelf in southeast Asia. The curve is based on more than 50 radiocarbon dates from elevations of +1.43 m to −15.09 m representing sea-level index points in intertidal mangrove and shallow marine sediments deposited by sea-level riseaccompanying deglaciation. The results indicate that mean sea level rose rapidly from around −17 m at 9500 cal BP to around −3 m by 8000 cal BP. After this time, the data suggest (but do not unequivocally prove) that the rate of sea-rise slowed for a period of 300–500 years centred on ∼7700 cal BP, shortly after the cessation of meltwater input to the oceans from the northern hemisphere. Renewed sea-level rise amounting to 3–5 m began around 7400 cal BP and was complete by 7000 cal BP. The existence of an inflection in the rate of sea-level rise, with a slow-down centred on ∼7700 cal BP, is broadly consistent with other available sea-level curves over this interval and is supported by evidence of stable shorelines and delta initiation elsewhere at this time, as well as evidence of comparatively rapid retreat of the West Antarctic ice sheet beginning around 7500 cal BP. ‘Stepped’ sea-level rise occurring shortly after 7500 cal BP and also earlier during deglaciation may have served to focus significant post-glacial episodes of human maritime/coastal dispersal, into comparatively narrow time intervals.
17. Hori, Kazuaki, and Yoshiki Saito. “An early Holocene sea‐level jump and delta initiation.” Geophysical Research Letters 34.18 (2007).  Early Holocene sea‐level change controlled the evolution of clastic coastal depositional systems. Radiocarbon‐dated borehole cores obtained from three incised‐valley‐fill systems in Asia (Changjiang, Song Hong, and Kiso River) record very similar depositional histories, especially between about 9000 and 8500 cal BP. Sedimentary facies changes from estuarine sand and mud to shelf or prodelta mud suggest that the marine influence in the incised valleys increased during this period. In addition, large decreases in sediment accumulation rates occurred. A sea‐level jump causes an estuarine system and its depocenter to move rapidly landward. It is possible that the final collapse of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, accompanied by catastrophic drainage of glacial lakes, at approximately 8500 cal BP caused such a jump. The jump was followed immediately by a period of decelerated sea‐level rise that promoted delta initiation.
18. Turney, Chris SM, and Heidi Brown. “Catastrophic early Holocene sea level rise, human migration and the Neolithic transition in Europe.” Quaternary Science Reviews 26.17-18 (2007): 2036-2041.  The collapse of the Laurentide Ice Sheet and release of freshwater 8740–8160 years ago abruptly raised global sea levels by up to 1.4 m. The effect on human populations is largely unknown. Here we constrain the time of the main sea level rise and investigate its effect on the onset of the Neolithic across Europe. An analysis of radiocarbon ages and palaeoshoreline reconstruction supports the hypothesis that flooding of coastal areas led to the sudden loss of land favoured by early farmers and initiated an abrupt expansion of activity across Europe, driven by migrating Neolithic peoples.
19. Asami, Ryuji, et al. “Evidence for tropical South Pacific climate change during the Younger Dryas and the Bølling–Allerød from geochemical records of fossil Tahiti corals.” Earth and Planetary Science Letters 288.1-2 (2009): 96-107. We present monthly resolved records of strontium/calcium (Sr/Ca) and oxygen isotope (δ¹⁸O) ratios from well-preserved fossil corals drilled during the Integrated Ocean Drilling Program (IODP) Expedition 310 “Tahiti Sea Level” and reconstruct sea surface conditions in the central tropical South Pacific Ocean during two time windows of the last deglaciation. The two Tahiti corals examined here are uranium/thorium (U/Th)-dated at 12.4 and 14.2 ka, which correspond to the Younger Dryas (YD) cold reversal and the Bølling–Allerød (B–A) warming of the Northern Hemisphere, respectively. The coral Sr/Ca records indicate that annual average sea surface temperature (SST) was 2.6–3.1 °C lower at 12.4 ka and 1.0–1.6 °C lower at 14.2 ka relative to the present, with no significant changes in the amplitude of the seasonal SST cycle. These cooler conditions were accompanied by seawater δ¹⁸O (δ¹⁸O_sw) values higher by ~ 0.8‰ and ~ 0.6‰ relative to the present at 12.4 and 14.2 ka, respectively, implying more saline conditions in the surface waters. Along with previously published coral Sr/Ca records from the island [Cohen and Hart (2004), Deglacial sea surface temperatures of the western tropical Pacific: A new look at old coral. Paleoceanography 19, PA4031, doi:10.1029/2004PA001084], our new Tahiti coral records suggest that a shift toward lower SST by ~ 1.5 °C occurred from 13.1 to 12.4 ka, which was probably associated with a shift toward higher δ¹⁸O_sw by ~ 0.2‰. Along with a previously published coral Sr/Ca record from Vanuatu [Corrège et al. (2004), Interdecadal variation in the extent of South Pacific tropical waters during the Younger Dyras event. Nature 428, 927–929], the Tahiti coral records provide new evidence for a pronounced cooling of the western to central tropical South Pacific during the Northern Hemisphere YD event.
20. Liu, Zhengyu, et al. “Transient simulation of last deglaciation with a new mechanism for Bølling-Allerød warming.” Science325.5938 (2009): 310-314.  We conducted the first synchronously coupled atmosphere-ocean general circulation model simulation from the Last Glacial Maximum to the Bølling-Allerød (BA) warming. Our model reproduces several major features of the deglacial climate evolution, suggesting a good agreement in climate sensitivity between the model and observations. In particular, our model simulates the abrupt BA warming as a transient response of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) to a sudden termination of freshwater discharge to the North Atlantic before the BA. In contrast to previous mechanisms that invoke AMOC multiple equilibrium and Southern Hemisphere climate forcing, we propose that the BA transition is caused by the superposition of climatic responses to the transient CO₂ forcing, the AMOC recovery from Heinrich Event 1, and an AMOC overshoot.
21. Griffiths, Michael L., et al. “Increasing Australian–Indonesian monsoon rainfall linked to early Holocene sea-level rise.” Nature Geoscience 2.9 (2009): 636.  The Australian–Indonesian summer monsoon affects rainfall variability and hence terrestrial productivity in the densely populated tropical Indo–Pacific region. It has been proposed that the main control of summer monsoon precipitation on millennial timescales is local insolation^1,2,3, but unravelling the mechanisms that have influenced monsoon variability and teleconnections has proven difficult, owing to the lack of high-resolution records of past monsoon behaviour. Here we present a precisely dated reconstruction of monsoon rainfall over the past 12,000 years, based on oxygen isotope measurements from two stalagmites collected in southeast Indonesia. We show that the summer monsoon precipitation increased during the Younger Dryas cooling event, when Atlantic meridional overturning circulation was relatively weak⁴. Monsoon precipitation intensified even more rapidly from 11,000 to 7,000 years ago, when the Indonesian continental shelf was flooded by global sea-level rise^5,6,7. We suggest that the intensification during the Younger Dryas cooling was caused by enhanced winter monsoon outflow from Asia and a related southward migration of the intertropical convergence zone⁸. However, the early Holocene intensification of monsoon precipitation was driven by sea-level rise, which increased the supply of moisture to the Indonesian archipelago.
22. Bard, Edouard, Bruno Hamelin, and Doriane Delanghe-Sabatier. “Deglacial meltwater pulse 1B and Younger Dryas sea levels revisited with boreholes at Tahiti.” Science327.5970 (2010): 1235-1237.  Reconstructing sea-level changes during the last deglaciation provides a way of understanding the ice dynamics that can perturb large continental ice sheets. The resolution of the few sea-level records covering the critical time interval between 14,000 and 9,000 CYBP calendar years before the present is still insufficient to draw conclusions about sea-level changes associated with the Younger Dryas cold event and the meltwater pulse 1B (MWP-1B). We used the uranium-thorium method to date shallow-living corals from three new cores drilled onshore in the Tahiti barrier reef. No significant discontinuity can be detected in the sea-level rise during the MWP-1B period. The new Tahiti sea-level record shows that the sea-level rise slowed down during the Younger Dryas before accelerating again during the Holocene.
23. Bird, Michael I., et al. “Punctuated eustatic sea-level rise in the early mid-Holocene.” Geology 38.9 (2010): 803-806.  Whether eustatic sea-level rise through the Holocene has been punctuated or continuous has remained controversial for almost two decades. Resolving this debate has implications for predicting future responses of remaining ice sheets to climate change and also for understanding the drivers of human settlement and dispersal patterns through prehistory. Here we present a sea-level curve for the past 8900 yr from Singapore, a tectonically stable location remote from ice-loading effects. We also present critical and unique sedimentation rate, organic δ¹³C, and foraminiferal δ¹³C proxy records of sea-level change derived from a shallow-marine sediment core from the same area over the same time interval. The sea-level curve, corroborated by the independent proxy records, suggests rapid rise at a rate of 1.8 m/100 yr until 8100 cal (calibrated) yr B.P., a near cessation in the rate of sea-level rise between 7800 and 7400 cal yr B.P., followed by a renewed rise of 4–5 m that was complete by 6500 cal yr B.P. We suggest that this period of relatively stable sea level during the early to mid-Holocene enabled modern deltas to advance, providing a highly productive environment for the establishment of coastal sedentary agriculture. Periods of rapid sea-level rise before and after may have catalyzed significant postglacial episodes of human dispersal in coastal regions.
24. Obbink, Elizabeth A., Anders E. Carlson, and Gary P. Klinkhammer. “Eastern North American freshwater discharge during the Bølling-Allerød warm periods.” Geology 38.2 (2010): 171-174. During the last deglaciation (ca. 19–6.5 ka), increased freshwater discharge to the North Atlantic likely caused reductions in Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) strength. However, the locations and rates of freshwater discharge are not well constrained, particularly those during the centennial-scale climate oscillations of the Bølling-Allerød warm periods (ca. 14.6–12.9 ka). Here we reconstruct the salinity-dependent δ¹⁸O_sw (sw, seawater) adjacent to the eastern outlets of North America, using paired Mg/Ca and δ¹⁸O records on planktonic foraminifera, to investigate whether increased discharge to the North Atlantic caused reductions in AMOC during the Bølling-Allerød and earlier periods of deglaciation. In general, δ¹⁸O_sw decreased and inferred freshwater discharge increased during periods of reduced AMOC. During the Bølling-Allerød, δ¹⁸O_sw decreases coincided with three reductions in AMOC strength ca. 14.1, 13.8, and 13.3 ka. Freshwater discharge modeling suggests that discharge increases of 0.03–0.05 Sverdrups (10⁶ m³ s⁻¹) would explain these δ¹⁸O_sw decreases, which were sufficient to force reductions in AMOC strength. Concurrent changes in North Atlantic temperature, and subtropical and tropical atmospheric circulation and precipitation imply that small variations in the North Atlantic hydrologic system may have significant impacts on Northern Hemisphere climate.
25. Smith, D. E., et al. “The early Holocene sea level rise.” Quaternary Science Reviews 30.15-16 (2011): 1846-1860.  The causes, anatomy and consequences of the early Holocene sea level rise (EHSLR) are reviewed. The rise, of ca 60m, took place over most of the Earth as the volume of the oceans increased during deglaciation and is dated at 11,650–7000 cal. BP. The EHSLR was largely driven by meltwater release from decaying ice masses and the break up of coastal ice streams. The patterns of ice sheet decay and the evidence for meltwater pulses are reviewed, and it is argued that the EHSLR was a factor in the ca 8470 BP flood from Lake Agassiz-Ojibway. Patterns of relative sea level changes are examined and it is argued that in addition to regional variations, temporal changes are indicated. The impact of the EHSLR on climate is reviewed and it is maintained that the event was a factor in the 8200 BP cooling event, as well as in changes in ocean current patterns and their resultant effects. The EHSLR may also have enhanced volcanic activity, but no clear evidence of a causal link with submarine sliding on continental slopes and shelves can yet be demonstrated. The rise probably influenced rates and patterns of human migrations and cultural changes. It is concluded that the EHSLR was a major event of global significance, knowledge of which is relevant to an understanding of the impacts of global climate change in the future.
26. Deschamps, Pierre, et al. “Ice-sheet collapse and sea-level rise at the Bølling warming 14,600 years ago.” Nature483.7391 (2012): 559.  Past sea-level records provide invaluable information about the response of ice sheets to climate forcing. Some such records suggest that the last deglaciation was punctuated by a dramatic period of sea-level rise, of about 20 metres, in less than 500 years. Controversy about the amplitude and timing of this meltwater pulse (MWP-1A) has, however, led to uncertainty about the source of the melt water and its temporal and causal relationships with the abrupt climate changes of the deglaciation. Here we show that MWP-1A started no earlier than 14,650 years ago and ended before 14,310 years ago, making it coeval with the Bølling warming. Our results, based on corals drilled offshore from Tahiti during Integrated Ocean Drilling Project Expedition 310, reveal that the increase in sea level at Tahiti was between 12 and 22 metres, with a most probable value between 14 and 18 metres, establishing a significant meltwater contribution from the Southern Hemisphere. This implies that the rate of eustatic sea-level rise exceeded 40 millimetres per year during MWP-1A.
27. Törnqvist, Torbjörn E., and Marc P. Hijma. “Links between early Holocene ice-sheet decay, sea-level rise and abrupt climate change.” Nature Geoscience 5.9 (2012): 601.  The beginning of the current interglacial period, the Holocene epoch, was a critical part of the transition from glacial to interglacial climate conditions. This period, between about 12,000 and 7,000 years ago, was marked by the continued retreat of the ice sheets that had expanded through polar and temperate regions during the preceding glacial. This meltdown led to a dramatic rise in sea level, punctuated by short-lived jumps associated with catastrophic ice-sheet collapses. Tracking down which ice sheet produced specific sea-level jumps has been challenging, but two events between 8,500 and 8,200 years ago have been linked to the final drainage of glacial Lake Agassiz in north-central North America. The release of the water from this ice-dammed lake into the ocean is recorded by sea-level jumps in the Mississippi and Rhine-Meuse deltas of approximately 0.4 and 2.1 metres, respectively. These sea-level jumps can be related to an abrupt cooling in the Northern Hemisphere known as the 8.2 kyr event, and it has been suggested that the freshwater release from Lake Agassiz into the North Atlantic was sufficient to perturb the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. As sea-level rise on the order of decimetres to metres can now be detected with confidence and linked to climate records, it is becoming apparent that abrupt climate change during the early Holocene associated with perturbations in North Atlantic circulation required sustained freshwater release into the ocean.
28. Golledge, N. R., et al. “Antarctic contribution to meltwater pulse 1A from reduced Southern Ocean overturning.” Nature Communications 5 (2014): 5107.  During the last glacial termination, the upwelling strength of the southern polar limb of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation varied, changing the ventilation and stratification of the high-latitude Southern Ocean. During the same period, at least two phases of abrupt global sea-level rise—meltwater pulses—took place. Although the timing and magnitude of these events have become better constrained, a causal link between ocean stratification, the meltwater pulses and accelerated ice loss from Antarctica has not been proven. Here we simulate Antarctic ice sheet evolution over the last 25 kyr using a data-constrained ice-sheet model forced by changes in Southern Ocean temperature from an Earth system model. Results reveal several episodes of accelerated ice-sheet recession, the largest being coincident with meltwater pulse 1A. This resulted from reduced Southern Ocean overturning following Heinrich Event 1, when warmer subsurface water thermally eroded grounded marine-based ice and instigated a positive feedback that further accelerated ice-sheet retreat.
29. Thiagarajan, Nivedita, et al. “Abrupt pre-Bølling–Allerød warming and circulation changes in the deep ocean.” Nature511.7507 (2014): 75.  Several large and rapid changes in atmospheric temperature and the partial pressure of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere probably linked to changes in deep ocean circulation occurred during the last deglaciation. The abrupt temperature rise in the Northern Hemisphere and the restart of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation at the start of the Bølling–Allerød interstadial, 14,700 years ago, are among the most dramatic deglacial events, but their underlying physical causes are not known. Here we show that the release of heat from warm waters in the deep North Atlantic Ocean probably triggered the Bølling–Allerød warming and reinvigoration of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. Our results are based on coupled radiocarbon and uranium-series dates, along with clumped isotope temperature estimates, from water column profiles of fossil deep-sea corals in a limited area of the western North Atlantic. We find that during Heinrich stadial 1 (the cool period immediately before the Bølling–Allerød interstadial), the deep ocean was about three degrees Celsius warmer than shallower waters above. This reversal of the ocean’s usual thermal stratification pre-dates the Bølling–Allerød warming and must have been associated with increased salinity at depth to preserve the static stability of the water column. The depleted radiocarbon content of the warm and salty water mass implies a long-term disconnect from rapid surface exchanges, and, although uncertainties remain, is most consistent with a Southern Ocean source. The Heinrich stadial 1 ocean profile is distinct from the modern water column, that for the Last Glacial Maximum and that for the Younger Dryas, suggesting that the patterns we observe are a unique features of the deglacial climate system. Our observations indicate that the deep ocean influenced dramatic Northern Hemisphere warming by storing heat at depth that preconditioned the system for a subsequent abrupt overturning event during the Bølling–Allerød interstadial.

CHANELED SCABLAND

MISSOULA FLOODS BIBLIOGRAPHY 

1. Bretz, J. Harlen. “The Lake Missoula floods and the channeled scabland.” The Journal of Geology 77.5 (1969): 505-543.  This paper reviews the outstanding evidence for (1) repeated catastrophic outbursts of Montana’s glacially dammed Lake Missoula, (2) consequent overwhelming in many places of the preglacial divide along the northern margin of the Columbia Plateau in Washington, (3) remaking of the plateau’s preglacial drainage pattern into an anastomosing complex of floodwater channels (Channeled Scabland) locally eroded hundreds of feet into underlying basalt, (4) convergence of these flood-born rivers into the Columbia Valley at least as far as Portland, Oregon, and (5) deposition of a huge delta at Portland. Evidence that the major scabland rivers and the flooded Columbia were hundreds of feet deep exists in (1) gravel and boulder bars more than 100 feet high in mid-channels, (2) subfluvial cataract cliffs, alcoves, and plunge pools hundreds of feet in vertical dimension, (3) back-flooded silts high on slopes of preglacial valleys tributary to the scabland complex, and (4) the delta at Portland. Climatic oscillations of the Cordilleran ice sheet produced a succession of Lake Missoulas. Following studies by the writer, later investigators have correlated the Montana glacial record with recurrent scabland floods by soil profiles and a glacial and loessial stratigraphy, and have approximately dated some events by volcanic ash layers, peat deposits, and an archaeological site. Several unsolved problems are outlined in this paper.
2. Baker, Victor R., and Daniel J. Milton. “Erosion by catastrophic floods on Mars and Earth.” Icarus 23.1 (1974): 27-41.  The large Martian channels, especially Kasei, Ares, Tiu, Simud, and Mangala Valles, show morphologic features strikingly similar to those of the Channeled Scabland of eastern Washington, produced by the catastrophic breakout floods of Pleistocene Lake Missoula. Features in the overall pattern include the great size, regional anastomosis, and low sinuosity of the channels. Erosional features are streamlined hills, longitudinal grooves, inner channel cataracts, scour upstream of flow obstacles, and perhaps marginal cataracts and butte and basin topography. Depositional features are bar complexes in expanding reaches and perhaps pendant bars and alcove bars. Scabland erosion takes place in exceedingly deep, swift floodwater acting on closely jointed bedrock as a hydrodynamic consequence of secondary flow phenomena, including various forms of macroturbulent votices and flow separations. If the analogy to the Channeled Scabland is correct, floods involving water discharges of millions of cubic meters per second and peak flow velocities of tens of meters per second, but perhaps lasting no more than a few days, have occurred on Mars.
3. Atwater, Brian F. “Periodic floods from glacial Lake Missoula into the Sanpoil arm of glacial Lake Columbia, northeastern Washington.” Geology 12.8 (1984): 464-467. At least 15 floods ascended the Sanpoil arm of glacial Lake Columbia during a single glaciation. Varves between 14 of the flood beds indicate one back-flooding every 35 to 55 yr. This regularity suggests that the floods came from an ice-dammed lake that was self-dumping. Probably the self-dumping lake was glacial Lake Missoula, Montana, because the floods accord with inferred emptyings of that lake in frequency and number, apparently entered Lake Columbia from the east, and produced beds resembling backflood deposits of Lake Missoula floods in southern Washington.
4. Clarke, G. K. C., W. H. Mathews, and Robert T. Pack. “Outburst floods from glacial Lake Missoula.” Quaternary Research 22.3 (1984): 289-299. The Pleistocene outburst floods from glacial Lake Missoula, known as the “Spokane Floods”, released as much as 2184 km3 of water and produced the greatest known floods of the geologic past. A computer simulation model for these floods that is based on physical equations governing the enlargement by water flow of the tunnel penetrating the ice dam is described. The predicted maximum flood discharge lies in the range 2.74 × 106−13.7 × 106 m3 sec−1, lending independent glaciological support to paleohydrologic estimates of maximum discharge.
5. Waitt Jr, Richard B. “Case for periodic, colossal jokulhlaups from Pleistocene glacial Lake Missoula.” Geological Society of America Bulletin 96.10 (1985): 1271-1286. Two classes of field evidence firmly establish that late Wisconsin glacial Lake Missoula drained periodically as scores of colossal jökulhlaups (glacier-outburst floods). (1) More than 40 successive, flood-laid, sand-to-silt graded rhythmites accumulated in back-flooded valleys in southern Washington. Hiatuses are indicated between flood-laid rhythmites by loess and volcanic ash beds. Disconformities and nonflood sediment between rhythmites are generally scant because precipitation was modest, slopes gentle, and time between floods short. (2) In several newly analyzed deposits of Pleistocene glacial lakes in northern Idaho and Washington, lake beds comprising 20 to 55 varves (average = 30–40) overlie each successive bed of Missoula-flood sediment. These and many other lines of evidence are hostile to the notion that any two successive major rhythmites were deposited by one flood; they dispel the notion that the prodigious floods numbered only a few. The only outlet of the 2,500-km³ glacial Lake Missoula was through its great ice dam, and so the dam became incipiently buoyant before the lake could rise enough to spill over or around it. Like Grímsvötn, Iceland, Lake Missoula remained sealed as long as any segment of the glacial dam remained grounded; when the lake rose to a critical level ∼600 m in depth, the glacier bed at the seal became buoyant, initiating underflow from the lake. Subglacial tunnels then grew exponentially, leading to catastrophic discharge. Calculations of the water budget for the lake basin (including input from the Cordilleran ice sheet) suggest that the lakes filled every three to seven decades. The hydrostatic prerequisites for a jökulhlaup were thus re-established scores of times during the 2,000- to 2,500-yr episode of last-glacial damming. J Harlen Bretz’s “Spokane flood” outraged geologists six decades ago, partly because it seemed to flaunt catastrophism. The concept that Lake Missoula discharged regularly as jökulhlaups now accords Bretz’s catastrophe with uniformitarian principles.
6. Baker, Victor R., and Russell C. Bunker. “Cataclysmic late Pleistocene flooding from glacial Lake Missoula: A review.” Quaternary Science Reviews 4.1 (1985): 1-41.Late Wisconsin floods from glacial Lake Missoula occurred between approximately 16 and 12 ka BP. Many floods occurred; some were demonstrably cataclysmic. Early studies of Missoula flooding centered on the anomalous physiography of the Channeled Scabland, which J. Harlen Bretz hypothesized in 1923 to have developed during a debacle that he named ‘The Spokane Flood’. Among the ironies in the controversy over this hypothesis was a mistaken view of uniformitarianism held by Bretz’s adversaries. After resolution of the scabland’s origin by cataclysmic outburst flooding from glacial Lake Missoula, research since 1960 emphasized details of flood magnitudes, frequency, routing and number. Studies of flood hydraulics and other physical parameters need to utilize modern computerized procedures for flow modeling, lake-burst simulation, and sediment-transport analysis. Preliminary simulation models indicate the probability of multiple Late Wisconsin jökulhlaups from Lake Missoula, although these models predict a wide range of flood magnitudes. Major advances have been made in the study of low-energy, rhythmically bedded sediments that accumulated in flood slack-water areas. The ‘forty floods’ hypothesis postulates that each rhythmite represents the deposition in such slack-water areas of separate, distinct cataclysmic floods that can be traced from Lake Missoula to the vicinity of Portland, Oregon. However, the hypothesis has numerous unsubstantiated implications concerning flood magnitudes, sources, routing and sedimentation dynamics. There were multiple great Late Wisconsin floods in the Columbia River system of the northwestern United States. Studies of high-energy, high altitude flood deposits are necessary to evaluate the magnitudes of these floods. Improved geochronologic studies throughout the immense region impacted by the flooding will be required to properly evaluate flood frequency. The cataclysmic flood concept championed by J. Harlen Bretz continues to stimulate exciting and controversial research.
7. Atwater, Brian F. “Status of glacial Lake Columbia during the last floods from glacial Lake Missoula.” Quaternary Research27.2 (1987): 182-201. The last floods from glacial Lake Missoula, Montana, probably ran into glacial Lake Columbia, in northeastern Washington. In or near Lake Columbia’s Sanpoil arm, Lake Missoula floods dating from late in the Fraser glaciation produced normally graded silt beds that become thinner upsection and which alternate with intervals of progressively fewer varves. The highest three interflood intervals each contain only one or two varves, and about 200–400 successive varves conformably overlie the highest flood bed. This sequence suggests that jökulhlaup frequency progressively increased until Lake Missoula ended, and that Lake Columbia outlasted Lake Missoula. The upper Grand Coulee, Lake Columbia’s late Fraser-age outlet, contains a section of 13 graded beds, most of them sandy and separated by varves, that may correlate with the highest Missoula-flood beds of the Sanpoil River valley. The upper Grand Coulee also contains probable correlatives of many of the approximately 200–400 succeeding varves, as do nearby parts of the Columbia River valley. This collective evidence casts doubt on a prevailing hypothesis according to which one or more late Fraser-age floods from Lake Missoula descended the Columbia River valley with little or no interference from Lake Columbia’s Okanogan-lobe dam.
8. Benito, Gerardo. “Energy Expenditure and Geomorphic Work of the Cataclysmic Missoula Flooding in the Columbia River GGorge, USA.” Earth Surface Processes and Landforms: The Journal of the British Geomorphological Group 22.5 (1997): 457-472.  Cataclysmic releases from the glacially dammed Lake Missoula, producing exceptionally large floods, have resulted in significant erosional processes occurring over relatively short time spans. Erosional landforms produced by the cataclysmic Missoula floods appear to follow a temporal sequence in many areas of eastern Washington State. This study has focused on the sequence observed between Celilo and the John Day River, where the erosional features can be physically quantified in terms of stream power and geomorphic work. The step‐backwater calculations in conjunction with the geologic evidence of maximum flow stages, indicate a peak discharge for the largest Missoula flood of 10 × 10⁶m³s⁻¹. The analysis of local flow hydraulics and its spatial variation were obtained calculating the hydrodynamic variables within the different segments of a cross‐section. The nature and patterns of erosional features left by the floods are controlled by the local hydraulic variations. Therefore, the association of local hydraulic parameters with erosional and depositional flood features was critical in understanding landform development and geomorphic processes. The critical stream power required to initiate erosion varied for the different landforms of the erosional sequence, ranging from 500 W m⁻² for the streamlined hills, up to 4500 W m⁻² to initiate processes producing inner channels. Erosion is possible only during catastrophic floods exceeding those thresholds of stream power below which no work is expended in erosion. In fact, despite the multiple outbursts which occurred during the late Pleistocene, only a few of them had the required magnitude to overcome the threshold conditions and accomplish significant geomorphic work
9. Clague, John J., et al. “Paleomagnetic and tephra evidence for tens of Missoula floods in southern Washington.” Geology31.3 (2003): 247-250.  Paleomagnetic secular variation and a hiatus defined by two tephra layers confirm that tens of floods from Glacial Lake Missoula, Montana, entered Washington’s Yakima and Walla Walla Valleys during the last glaciation. In these valleys, the field evidence for hiatuses between floods is commonly subtle. However, paleomagnetic remanence directions from waterlaid silt beds in three sections of rhythmically bedded flood deposits at Zillah, Touchet, and Burlingame Canyon display consistent secular variation that correlates serially both within and between sections. The secular variation may further correlate with paleomagnetic data from Fish Lake, Oregon, and Mono Lake, California, for the interval 12,000–17,000 ¹⁴C yr B.P. Deposits of two successive floods are separated by two tephras derived from Mount St. Helens, Washington. The tephras differ in age by decades, indicating that a period at least this long separated two successive floods. The beds produced by these two floods are similar to all of the 40 beds in the slack-water sediment sequence, suggesting that the sequence is a product of tens of floods spanning a period of perhaps a few thousand years.
10. Benito, Gerardo, and Jim E. O’Connor. “Number and size of last-glacial Missoula floods in the Columbia River valley between the Pasco Basin, Washington, and Portland, Oregon.” Geological Society of America Bulletin 115.5 (2003): 624-638.Field evidence and radiocarbon age dating, combined with hydraulic flow modeling, provide new information on the magnitude, frequency, and chronology of late Pleistocene Missoula floods in the Columbia River valley between the Pasco Basin, Washington, and Portland, Oregon. More than 25 floods had discharges of >1.0 × 10⁶ m³/s. At least 15 floods had discharges of >3.0 × 10⁶ m³/s. At least six or seven had peak discharges of >6.5 × 10⁶ m³/s, and at least one flood had a peak discharge of ∼10 × 10⁶ m³/s, a value consistent with earlier results from near Wallula Gap, but better defined because of the strong hydraulic controls imposed by critical flow at constrictions near Crown and Mitchell Points in the Columbia River Gorge. Stratigraphy and geomorphic position, combined with 25 radiocarbon ages and the widespread occurrence of the ca. 13 ka (radiocarbon years) Mount St. Helens set-S tephra, show that most if not all the Missoula flood deposits exposed in the study area were emplaced after 19 ka (radiocarbon years), and many were emplaced after 15 ka. More than 13 floods perhaps postdate ca. 13 ka, including at least two with discharges of >6 × 10⁶m³/s. (6,000 years of ice sheet melt). From discharge and stratigraphic relationships upstream, we hypothesize that the largest flood in the study reach resulted from a Missoula flood that predated blockage of the Columbia River valley by the Cordilleran ice sheet. Multiple later floods, probably including the majority of floods recorded by fine- and coarse-grained deposits in the study area, resulted from multiple releases of glacial Lake Missoula that spilled into a blocked and inundated Columbia River valley upstream of the Okanogan lobe and were shunted south across the Channeled Scabland.

AN ALTERNATIVE THEORY OF THE MISSOULA FLOODS

BY: RANDAL CARLSON [LINK]    

The Randall Carlson hypothesis is that the amount of energy required to melt the ice sheet and create the amount of liquid water described by researchers is 180,000 megatons. This is a staggering amount of energy. It is equivalent to 18 times the total nuclear arsenal of the USA and Russia combined. No terrestrial source of energy exists to discharge this amount of energy on an instantaneous basis. Therefore it had to be an extraterrestrial source such as asteroid or meteor perhaps a swarm asteroids that struck the ice sheet and caused it to melt all at once.

Below is his description of the Missoula floods that closely matches the event as described in the bibliography above where ten papers are listed that agree on certain commonalities of the event. In particular the melt and floods did not occur all at once but over a period of thousands of years with somewhere between 40 to 70 melt-and-flood events separated by 50 years or more. Therefore an extraterrestrial energy source that can deliver the power of ten times the total nuclear arsenal of the USA and Russia in an instant is neither necessary nor plausible particularly so given the complete absence of evidence for such an event. The daily energy need of a 6,000-year ice melt event that needs a total of 180,000 megatons of energy is less than 7,000 joules, an amount that can be easily provided by solar irradiance reaching the surface of a 10-million-square-km ice sheet. 

The energy balance is as follows: 180,000 megatons of TNT is 7.54E20 Joules and over a 6,000-year period it works out to 1.26E17 Joules/year or 3.98E9 watts. At 1000 watts per square meter of sunshine energy we need about 6 million square meters but we have 10 million square km at least on that ice sheet.

Randall Carlson’s description of the Missoula floods is presented below. 

1. One of the great unresolved scientific mysteries of our time concerns an extensive body of evidence for extraordinary catastrophic flooding events in the very recent geological history of North America. From the Pacific Coast of Washington State, across the mountains and prairies to the Atlantic Coast of New England, from the region of the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi, from the arid deserts of the Southwest to the lush forests of the Southern Appalachians, the geo-morphological tracks of tremendous floods of truly prodigious scale are etched indelibly into the landscape.
2. Based upon irrefutable field evidence, these colossal floods utterly dwarf anything experienced by modern man within historical times, and yet, by geological standards they occurred exceptionally close to our own time, at the close of the most recent ice age, some 11 to 14 thousand years ago. Familiarity with the currently reigning dogmas regarding the cause of these great ice age floods would leave the casual observer with the impression that the explanation for this diluvial phenomenon has been more or less determined to the satisfaction of a majority of Earth scientists and the work remaining is only in sorting out a few particulars such as the exact number and timing of the floods.
3. However, it is our contention that the model of causation, which is accepted at present by the overwhelming majority of geologists who have investigated the phenomenon, has inherent difficulties. We argue that researchers have not yet grasped an accurate explanation and that the currently accepted hypotheses are beset with unexamined assumptions, inconsistencies and contradictory evidence.
4. The most impressive evidence for ancient mega-floods is found in the Pacific Northwest, primarily in Washington State, Idaho and western Montana. Here the flood features are attributed to a series of events referred to as The Missoula Floods, and these are blamed upon the repeated failure of a large ice dam that held back an enormous proglacial lake named Lake Missoula, allowing the lake to drain suddenly.
5. The lake is supposed to have occupied the mountain valleys of Western Montana, and to have been held in by a large valley glacier in the region of Lake Pend O’rielle in northern Idaho and finally to have drained to the west across southeastern Washington. The floodwater is then assumed to have entered the great valley of the Columbia River from whence it was conveyed to the Pacific Ocean. In the process of Lake Missoula’s repeated draining a massive complex of erosional and depositional features were created that have almost no parallel on Earth.
6. While they may have been the most spectacular, the Missoula Floods were not the only giant flood events to have occurred in North America as the great Ice Age drew to a close. The effects of mega scale flood flows have been extensively documented in the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains in both Canada and the U.S.; across the prairie states; in the vicinity of the Great Lakes; in Pennsylvania and western New York and in New England. All of the Canadian provinces preserve large-scale evidence of gigantic water flows. All regions within or proximal to the area of the last great glaciation show the effects of intense, mega-scale floods.
7. Complicating the problem is the fact that areas far removed from the immediate proximity of the glaciers have not been spared the ravages of gigantic floods. The arid American southwest preserves extensive evidence of vast flooding on a scale unprecedented in modern times. The Mojave Desert of Southern California is replete with evidence of mighty flood currents drowning entire landscapes. Likewise the Sonoran Desert in Arizona and New Mexico preserves evidence of mighty flood currents. One also finds in the southeastern United States, massive erosional and depositional features in the Appalachians that allow of no other explanation than that of colossal floods. Another great flood is attributed to the catastrophic draining of Lake Bonneville, which, during the latter part of the ice age occupied large intermontane basins in Utah. The Great Salt Lake is but a diminutive remnant of this giant lake.
8. The passage of catastrophic floods has left their mark in Pennsylvania and Western New York. The scientific documentation of these great floods reaches back into the nineteenth century, with repeated discoveries of various effects that could not be explained by invoking modern fluvial processes operating at a familiar scale, nor could they be explained by invoking glacial phenomenon. It appears that much of this continent wide flooding occurred during, or at the close of, the most recent ice age. The exact timing of the various events remains to be established. Much of the evidence points to episodic events stretching back tens of thousands of years.
9. However, it also appears that much of this continent wide mega flooding happened concurrently at the end of the last great ice age. Evidence for megascale flooding at the end of the most recent ice age, is not limited to North America, but has been documented from all over the world. This evidence supports the conclusion that large scale super-flooding events were globally ubiquitous throughout the ice age, but occurred with exceptional power and size at or near its conclusion.
10. Among the places around the planet from which proof is emerging of floods of extraordinary size – Siberia especially, in the Altai Mountains region near the Siberia/Mongolia border, hosts evidence for massive floods equivalent in scale and power to the largest western USA floods. Across northern Europe mega-flood evidence is found in abundance. South America, too, shows extensive evidence for massive catastrophic flooding in the recent geological past, as does Australia, New Zealand, the Middle East and Northern Africa.
11. However, for the time being, our focus will be on the great floods of North America. Eventually, however, it will be our goal to document and correlate this imposing mass of evidence for global catastrophe with a view to understanding its origin and causes. Then, we will be in a better position to address the question of social and cultural consequences. Emerging evidence of earlier mega flood events, apparently associated with global climate changes and transition phases from glacial to interglacial ages implies a non random distribution in time, perhaps periodic or cyclical. The geographic distribution of mega-scale flood events also appears to be non-random, certain areas being affected with greater intensity than others.
12. As stated, the Missoula Floods and Siberian floods were, as far as can be determined from field evidence at present, the greatest known freshwater floods in the history of the Earth. Other areas experienced floods of profound magnitude, but, not apparently on the scale of these two events, although the possibility of future discoveries should not be ruled out. The study of megafloods from tsunamis is a related but distinct area of palaeoflood hydrology, which in any comprehensive purview of catastrophism must be addressed. However, for now we shall limit our discussion to floods involving fresh water, meaning events related to glacial melting or rainfall.
13. The Missoula floods were the most powerful of the great North American floods. The vast scale, the complexity and the sheer magnitude of the forces involved bestow upon these mighty events a preeminent ranking in any accounting of Earth’s great catastrophes. Even a preliminary acquaintance with the awe-inspiring after effects of this extraordinary deluge can provoke a deep sense of wonder and astonishment. Through a more prolonged acquaintance with this landscape and the story that it tells, comes a humbling realization of the almost inconceivable power of the natural forces involved.
14. No flood events even remotely close in scale are documented from anywhere within historical times. They were one of the most significant geological occurrences in the history of the earth. Their magnitude and the release of energies involved rank them with the greatest forces of nature of which we are aware. What renders these diluvial events of exceptional importance and interest is that they occurred only yesterday in the span of geological time, and, most significantly, well within the time of Man.
15. Let us place the great floods in context. The final phase of the last ice age, the Late Wisconsin, as it is called in reference to North America’s version of the Great Ice Age, came to a conclusion only some 12,000 to 14,000 years ago. While the effects of the ice age were global, the Late Wisconsin itself was the last episode of major ice expansion in North America at the close of the larger cycle of glacial climate called simply the Wisconsin. The final phase known as the Late Wisconsin appears to have lasted from approximately 25 or 26 thousand years before present to around 10 to 12 thousand years before present, depending upon how one defines the precise point of termination.
16. The entire Wisconsin Ice Age lasted for around 100,000 years. While the timing and extent of glacial recessions and expansions throughout the Wisconsin Ice Age is still being worked out, it is clear that the fluctuations of climate and glacial mass during this time were considerably greater than that experience within historical times. Three ice ages in North America that were earlier than the Wisconsin have been documented by geologists and named after the states in which their glacial effects are best preserved. From oldest to youngest they were the Nebraskan, the Kansan and the Illinoian. Each of these glacial ages was separated from the next by distinct interglacial periods. The warm interval preceding the Wisconsin Ice Age and following the Illinoian is called the Sangamonian (Eemian).
17. The European counterpart of the Wisconsin Ice Age is called the Würm, which has been extensively documented in the Alps. The signature of the Wisconsin Ice Age was, obviously, the presence of huge volumes of glacial ice where no such ice now exists. In North America this was most of Canada and a substantial amount of the northern United States. The northern boundary of the great North American ice sheet reached to the Arctic Ocean. From there south to the area now occupied by the Great Lakes the entire region was entirely buried under glacial ice. At the southern glacial margin the ice reached almost to the Ohio River in the eastern half of the U.S. New York lay under a half mile to a mile of ice. Most of the states of Wisconsin and Minnesota were buried as well as the Dakotas.
18. The ice reached out of Canada across what is now the border, from Montana to the Pacific Ocean, with several major incursions further south in Idaho along the Rocky Mountains and in Washington State. Great glaciers also occupied many areas of the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada mountains. In all, some 6 million square miles was buried beneath a mantle of ice, about the same size as that now occupying the South Polar Region on Antarctica. Reference to this map will help to give you the big picture of the Late Wisconsin Ice Age.
19. At the peak of the Late Wisconsin, around 18,000 to 15,000 years before present, the great ice mass reached from the Atlantic to the Pacific. However, there were actually two separate ice sheets that began separately some 5 to 7 thousand years earlier and eventually grew until they coalesced near the final stage of the Late Wisconsin. The easternmost and the larger of the two was named the Laurentide Ice sheet after a region in Quebec where it appears the ice first began accumulating. This ice sheet appears to have formed from the convergence of two centers of nucleation and outflow, one center to the east of present day Hudson Bay and one to the west.
20. A separate ice sheet formed over the Canadian Rockies and has been designated the Cordilleran Ice Sheet by glaciologists after the collective term for the great mountain chain that forms both the Rocky Mountains and the Andes. As the Late Wisconsin reached its maximum it appears that these three ice sheets coalesced in an essentially single mass. One controversial question relates to the timing and extent of an ice free corridor between the Laurentide and Cordilleran Ice sheets, either prior to their convergence, or after, during the retreat phase.
21. A supposition would be that humans could have utilized such an ice free corridor to migrate to the lower United States from Alaska, after crossing the Bering Land Bridge, which, of course, was exposed during the lowered sea levels of the Ice Age. As described in more detail elsewhere, through most of the late Nineteenth century and the first half of the Twentieth, it was believed that the most recent ice age was essentially an unbroken episode of global cooling and ice growth which for the most part continued uninterrupted for some 150 thousand years, or longer. It was also believed that the transitions into and out of an ice age were protracted episodes lasting tens of thousands of years.
22. However, during the second half of the Twentieth Century, with improved dating, and with more precise and detailed stratigraphy available, it became apparent that the climate changes associated with the onset and termination of ice ages occurred much more rapidly than believed by earlier workers. As the Twentieth Century drew to a close, high-resolution records bore witness to climate changes that occurred with astonishing speed and severity. The most recent episode of widespread catastrophic flooding occurred at the termination the Late Wisconsin. Some of these floods were associated directly with melting of the glacial ice. Others are only indirectly linked to glacial melting. 
23. The most powerful of the terminal ice age floods was the complex of events known as the Missoula Floods, a much more complex series of floods rather than a single large scale event. The effects of the Missoula Floods can be found imprinted upon the landscape of the Pacific Northwest from western Montana to the Pacific Ocean, and, in addition to Montana include the states of Idaho, Washington and Oregon. Our intention will be to convey an understanding of these awesome floods and to raise some questions concerning important issues that have not yet been addressed under the current state of research.
24. The other catastrophic floods which occurred during this period of transition out of the ice age, roughly from 13,000 to 11,000 years ago, will be examined in an effort to understand the phenomenon accompanying the end of the Great Ice Age, and which, hopefully, will shed light on the most important question, which remains “What factor, or combination of factors, brought about the abrupt and extreme climate changes which terminated the ice age, and provoked catastrophic melting of the ice complex?”

THE SOURCE DOCUMENT FROM WHICH THIS POST IS DERIVED >> [LINK]

FIGURE 1  

FIGURE 2

A CHAOS THEORY OF GLACIATION CYCLES

1. There is no satisfactory explanation for glaciation cycles because the theories proposed impose a fixed periodicity that is not found in the data; as well the progress of both the rise to glacial maximum and fall to interglacial are interrupted by brief reversals at millennial time scales as seen in the video above that shows the formation and decay phases of the Last Glacial Period. For at least two million years the size of the mass of ice accumulation in the high northern latitudes has followed a cyclical pattern; growing at times to cover most of the northern continents during glaciation and then receding to approximately where it is today in interglacial periods.
2. The traditional theory of the glaciation cycle, first forwarded by Milutin Milankovitch, attempts to link the earth’s precession, tilt, and eccentricity to glaciation cycles. The theory implies that the length of glaciation cycles is fixed at integer multiples of the precession cycle of 26,000 years. But this is not what we see in the data where we find a more random and chaotic time scale of glaciation cycles. The evidence suggests that icy periods last from 20 to 100 thousand years and interglacials between 7 and 20 thousand years. These time scales are not integer multiples of the precession period. The non-periodic nature of the phenomenon has not been adequately addressed in the Milankovitch theory.
3. Another mystery of glaciation cycles is that within any icy period there are violent cycles of ice melt that don’t make it all the way to an interglacial. During the meltdown, large chunks of ice slide out to sea and the continental ice sheets get thinner. But within a few years it begins to get thicker again. The commonly held explanation for this behavior is due to Hartmut Heinrich. He says that as the ice gets thicker it acts as insulation and allows internal heat from the earth to melt the bottom of the ice and cause glacial flows. The problem with the Heinrich theory is that evidence suggests that glacial flows are not regional but global and at such a large scale that synchronization of localized hot spots is highly improbable.
4. Linear causation theories such as these subsume that for any given climactic state there is a stable steady state ice level on the northern continents; and that any change from the steady state level can only be caused by a significant event with sufficient energy to cause the change. But this is not always the case in nature.
5. Many natural systems exhibit non-linear dynamics and are meta-stable. In these systems many different “equilibrium” states are possible and even the slightest trigger (the proverbial butterfly) can bring about substantial changes in the equilibrium state. A graphical model of meta-stability is shown in Figure 1. The ball in the deep bowl is in stable equilibrium. It will require a great deal of energy to shift the ball to another equilibrium state and if such a shift is observed a theory like that of Heinrich or Milankovitch might be required. The ball in the shallow bowl is in meta-stable equilibrium. Although it appears to be in steady state, many other steady state conditions are equally likely and minute random events can make wholesale changes to the position of the ball.
6. We propose that ice formation in the northern continents is such a system. The time series of ice fractions is in chaotic equilibrium at wildly different levels of ice. The non-linearity in the system is imposed by the annual summer/winter heat cycles and by the reflective nature of ice. Such a non-linear model may be used to explain glaciations, interglacials, Heinrich events, and, most importantly, the non-periodicity of these events. In a purely solar and atmospheric view of these changes, the waxing and waning of the ice fraction can be nonlinear because ice is melted by heat that the planet has absorbed from sunlight; and the heat absorbed by the planet is a function of the ice fraction because ice reflects sunlight. However, as described by James Edward Kamis [LINK] , random and unpredictable geothermal events can also intervene and play a role in glaciation cycles. Therefore, a simplistic and periodic theory of glaciation cycles is unlikely to provide a satisfactory explanation for what is likely to be a phenomenon of non-linear dynamics. 
7. The chaos model shown in Figure 2 demonstrates the surprising impact of non linear dynamics. In the model, a sine function is used to generate the annual incident solar radiation on the northern hemisphere of the tilted earth as it rotates on its axis and revolves around the sun. We begin the simulation with an assumed size of the polar cap which has a tendency to grow unless melted by solar radiation. A small perturbation (1%) is added to the solar radiation function to insert non-linear dynamics into the system.
8. We find that large swings in the ice fraction is possible under these chaos conditions. “Glaciation periods”, that is, high ice fractions, form naturally and tend to persist. Just as naturally the ice recedes in brief interglacial periods. What’s more surprising is the existence of the Heinrich events within these epochs. Both the glaciation cycle and the Heinrich events are produced as a result of a non-linearity in the heating function and without imposing an external causal force.
9. The more ice you have the less energy gets absorbed and even more ice can be formed. Conversely, the more ice you melt, the more energy you can absorb and more ice you can melt. This is the dynamic that can be set off in either direction by minute random effects. It appears that nonlinear dynamics play a role in these ice cycles and the attempt to explain these cycles purely in a cause and effect deterministic way does not address the observed chaotic behavior.
10. Another source of the chaos in glaciation cycles may arise from called Hurst persistence, often seen in time series data, in which random changes tend to persist. This effect is demonstrated in a Youtube video that appears below [LINK].
11. Yet another theory of glaciation cycles is proposed by James Kamis (and also by Ben Wouters in the comments section below). Kamis says that because we are interglacial creatures, we tend to see glaciation cycles from an interglacial perspective where interglacial is the norm and glaciation is the oddity that needs to be explained. However, the earth spends most of its time in the glaciation state and somewhere between 10% to 15% of its time in an interglacial state, so that glaciation is the norm and it is interglacials that need explaining and the earth’s own geological forces and geothermal heat provide all the energy we need to explain interglacials [LINK] .

HURST PERSISTENCE IN TIME SERIES DATA

Katrina vanden Heuvel and Bill McKibben

This post is transcript of a video posted on Twitter by @rmack2x on 6/24/2019. Only the presentations by Katrina vanden Heuvel and Bill McKibben were transcribed and they are presented below. The presentation by Katrina was live. That by Bill was via video link. A snapshot of the Bill McKibben video link is presented below. After the presentation, Katrina played a Trump video for the audience. A snapshot of the Trump video appears below.

It is hoped that this post will shed some light on alarmist climate news in the media. The reason for that appears to be that the media has enlisted as climate activists. Bill McKibben is a high profile link between news media and climate activism but the connection is found to be much more well developed, formal, deliberate, and a carefully planned objective of journalism in the USA.

Deliberate climate activism by the media compromises what has been traditionally assumed, that the function of the news media is objective news reporting independent of the personal feelings, emotions, and activism needs of the journalist. In other words, it is generally assumed that the journalist should remove himself or herself from the situation and not get emotionally and personally involved in reporting the news.

For example, in matters of AGW science, journalists may quote climate scientists but may not make such evaluations of their own particularly when the statements are conclusions drawn from extreme weather events or when they have a fear mongering characteristic.  And yet here we have a journalism conference hosted by the Columbia University School of Journalism that lays out a formal plan of deliberate climate activism to hype Catastrophic AGW apparently because such activism is consistent with the personal feelings and desires of the journalists in attendance. It appears that climate change news in the media cannot be taken as objective news reporting but must be evaluated as climate activism even more so than the alarmist claims of climate scientists.

Katrina vanden Heuvel  &  Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben Video Link Snapshot 

Snapshot of the Trump Video

[LIST OF POSTS ON THIS SITE]

CJR Event on Covering Climate Change, May, 2019
Location: Columbia University School of Journalism

The conference is sponsored by The Guardian, The Nation, the Rockefellers, and the Podcast “The Mothers of Invention, a feminist prism through which to look at climate”.

1. Presentation by Katrina vanden Heuvel, Publisher, The Nation: You wouldn’t be attending this conference if you didn’t understand how urgent the climate crisis is, how late the hour, how central our work as journalists in confronting this emergency. And yes, emergency is the right word. The Earth has been overheating for decades but now we are seeing the effects in real time.
2. Most recently massive floods inundated the Midwest, overturning, overrunning levees, punishing farmers and rural communities, and racking up billions of dollars’ worth of economic damage. Overseas, the people of Mozambique were hit last week by the second major cyclone in a month. An estimated 900 people have died in that island nation and countless more suffering disease and homelessness. I could cite a dozen more examples but I won’t because the point of today’s conference is for us to talk as journalists on how our profession should respond to this historical moment.
3. We are issuing a clarion call to US news outlets to rise to the climate challenge. At a time when civilization is accelerating toward disaster, climate silence continues to reign across the bulk of the US news media. The silence is most striking among commercial news outlets especially television. Too often ratings take precedence over responsibility. But to be clear, this is structural, not a personal responsibility problem. How to find a way within the existing constraints to do exemplary coverage of the climate crisis is the central topic of our time today because never has been it more important for American journalism to remember first principles.
4. Our institutional role within this democracy is to inform the powerful, and the people, and hold the powerful fully accountable. We envision today’s conference as the beginning. The beginning of a conversation America’s journalists and news organizations must have with one another and with the public, because we’re supposed to serve.
5. To cover this uncoiling, rapidly uncoiling, crisis emergency is central to our task. Judging by the coverage today much of the US media still don’t get it. There is a runaway train racing toward us and its name is climate change. That is not alarmism. It is scientific fact.
6. Humanity has just 12 years, 12 years to slash emissions of heat trapping gases in half or face unimaginable catastrophe. That’s what the UN climate scientists told us last fall. They added that achieving this goal will require radically transforming energy, agriculture, and other few sectors of the world economy. Our conviction in organizing this conference is that the media sector must be transformed as well. Today’s conference is a first step in that direction.
7. The Nation and the Columbia Journalism Review are committed to continuing this work through a project we are calling “Covering Climate Now”. We will work with journalists and news organizations throughout the country to dramatically improve coverage of the climate emergency. Whether you work in TV, radio, print, online, whether your audience is local, regional, or national, we invite you to join this project, add your interests and experiences, and yes, your criticisms, to the work ahead. We can’t succeed without you.
8. Unless the American people get better informed about the realities of the climate crisis and the solutions, there’s little hope of building the public pressure to push government and corporate decision makers to make the big, bold, rapid changes necessary. It won’t be easy but we don’t have much choice. If we don’t attempt what seems impossible to those who think in small incremental ways, we will face the unthinkable. If we don’t get the climate story right, and fast, nothing else will matter. Plays the Trump video.
9. Presentation by Mark Hertsgaard: News Reporter, The Nation: Introduces Bill McKibben, journalist, and founder of 350.org. Author of “Falter”, “The End of Nature” and a number of other works. Bill had been covering climate change for 30 years.  Bill McKibben participates remotely over the internet.
10. Presentation by Bill McKibben, journalist and founder of 350.org: Climate change for 30 years has not been journalism’s finest hour. We know now much more of the behind the scene story than we did even a few years ago. Investigative reporting at InsideClimateNews of the LA Times and Columbia Journalism School helped us a few years ago to understand what was going on at the beginning of this story.
11. What was going on was that the fossil fuel industry knew pretty much everything there was to know about climate change in the 1980s. This makes sense in retrospect. These were the biggest companies in the world at the time with great scientists and their product was carbon. So it makes sense that they would do the work to find out what was going on. They did do the work. They established early in the 1980s that the planet was going to warm and indeed the executives of the major fossil fuel companies believed the predictions of their scientists. Exxon began building their drilling rigs to compensate for the rise in temperature they knew was in the offing.
12. What they didn’t do of course was to tell any of the rest of us. Instead they did just the opposite. We know now from whistle blowers and archived documents and things, that beginning right after James Hansen’s Congressional Testimony on global warming in 1988, the oil industry began the project of setting up an architecture of denial and misinformation. And the strategy they hit on was the same strategy that the tobacco industry had used, and indeed they hired many of the veterans from that industry.
13. The strategy was to try and pretend that there was doubt about the situation. Climate change was new enough so that it was a fairly plausible strategy. For a few years as scientists were getting their ducks in a row, it’s understandable that journalism fell for the creation of what was in essence a phony debate. The strategy was to create an impression that we didn’t know if global warming was real.
14. The phoniness of this debate is that both sides knew the answer to that question right at the beginning. It’s just that one of them was willing to mount a PR offensive in the opposite direction of the truth. That PR offensive was obviously extremely successful. The way that it manifested for more than two decades in journalism was an endless collection of “one the one hand, abd on the other hand
15. For the negative stories about climate change the same three or four or five climate denying science skeptics were given the same space and breath and legitimacy as the vast and robust intensity that had been developed around climate science. In other words, this was one of the cases where the PR guys did in the journalists. They got the better of us for a very long time.
16. And that was tragic because the three decades essentially that we wasted in this phony debate were the three decades that we most needed in order to become journalists of climate change. That’s now past. There’s no use crying over it. The question now is how to proceed and tell this story.
17. And there’s a way in which the story has to be told with reference to those three decades because the wasted time that we spent has meant that we have fewer options than we used to have. One of the things I have to restrain myself from doing, and I don’t always succeed, is oh if only you had listened to be back then.
18. Thirty years ago when we were first writing about these things, there were a number of relatively small changes in the necessary course correction. We didn’t do those things and so now all the things that we have to do are dramatic and difficult. That will lead to the next challenge for journalism which is portraying, helping people understand, why those large changes have to come now. Why it is not enough to begin taking small steps around the edges.
19. I just want to say that I guess better late than never has to be the watchword. The good news for is, for journalists, that this is, beyond any doubt, the most compelling story of our time. It is the story by which our era will be remembered and it touches on every single part of human life and hence every beat that journalists cover. It is increasingly at the center of our economic life, our political life, and the center of our theological life.
20. Religious environmentalism emerges as a force. The possibilities now for getting the coverage right are crucial. I don’t mean parroting what movements are saying although it is pretty important to acknowledge that this is a case where the movements got it right long before others did. What I mean is taking on this story with the full weight and gravity and seriousness that it deserves, and somehow allowing the American people to catch up to those three decades of wasted time of weak coverage of this most central of questions.
21. Comment by David Albert (below): I am left aghast at the hubristic error in these two articles. How can people who intend to tell the truth be so wrong? How can they be seeking facts and find such nonsense? Maybe they have no such intention and aren’t really seeking. Has anyone challenged McKibben to produce any of the “misleading” documents he asserts the fossil fuel industry produced? Does Ms. Heuvel really think that our CO2 caused these catastrophes? She clearly implies they would never have happened without our fossil fuel use. A journalist with no knowledge of the past is one I would not trust for factual reporting let alone opinion on the interpretation of her reports.

[LIST OF POSTS ON THIS SITE]

1. 1980, CARBON DIOXIDE COULD CHANGE WEATHER: Since 1850 and the Industrial Revolution we have doubled atmospheric CO2 and if we  continue to burn fossil fuels it could double again in the next fifty years (2030) because fossil fuels produce carbon dioxide faster than plants can absorb them. Warming could cause the West Antarctic Ice Sheet to crack and slide into the ocean to raise sea levels by 16 feet and submerge Florida. There are too many uncertainties to asses the economic impact.
2. 1981, AIR POLLUTANTS COMPLICATE GLOBAL WARMING PROBLEM: Chlorofluorocarbons, like carbon dioxide, also trap heat and cause global warming that can lead to melting polar ice caps and rising sea levels. The combination of CFC and CO2 emitted by human activity in the 1980s will raise temperature by 0.2 to 0.3 C rising above the level of the 1930s, the warmest period of this century. The mean surface temperature along the spring and summer line of melting snow in the Northern Hemisphere has gone up. These measurements were taken where the climate models had predicted they would be. The decline in fall and winter temperatures in the 1970s was an exception to the general rule. In addition, CFCs also threaten the protective ozone shield against harmful solar radiation.
3. 1981, ICE CAP MELTING FORECAST: Institute for Space Studies, NYC: Rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere could bring a global warming of unprecedented magnitude melting the polar ice caps and flooding lowlands in the next century. The temperature rise could be 4.5 to 8 F depending on the growth in fossil fuel consumption. A doubling of CO2 will cause a temperature rise of 6 F. The West Antarctic Ice Sheet is vulnerable to rapid disintegration and melting. A global mean temperature rise of 3.6 F could cause a rise of 9 F at Antarctica melting the Ice Sheet and raising sea levels by 15 to 20 feet and flooding 25% of Florida and Louisiana within a span of 100 years or less.
4. 1982, GOVERNMENTS IGNORING GLOBAL WARMING TREND: The use of fossil fuels will cause atmospheric carbon dioxide to double in the next 40 to 100 years raising temperatures by an average of 5 F by virtue of the greenhouse effect because carbon dioxide traps heat. The warming will cause polar ice to melt. In high northern latitudes spring will come earlier and earlier and winter later and later causing a decline in soil moisture. Warmer temperatures and less rainfall will devastate agriculture in much of the United States and the Soviet Union but a more regular monsoon pattern in India will increase rice production. Glaciers will melt and raise sea levels. But the government is not taking these forecasts seriously because scientists have not been able to communicate useful information to them and because some scientists have disputed these forecasts saying that warming can be self-correcting because it causes the formation of more clouds that reflect sunlight. Because there will be winners and losers from global warming, scientists cannot tell policymakers whether the net effect will be positive or negative. There is not a clear message for policymakers. The US government has cut research funds for the study of global warming from $14 million to $9 million eliminating the study of the social and political impact of global warming. Global warming is not a catastrophe because rich nations have the resources to deal with it and most of the developing countries will actually be better off.
5. 1982, GLOBAL MEAN SEA LEVEL AN INDICATION OF CLIMATE CHANGE, Two NOAA scientists published a paper in Science to say that in the period 1940-1980 50,000 cubic km of polar ice has melted by global warming and the sea level has risen by thermal expansion as well as the added water from the ice melt. Global warming is “due in some degree presumably to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide” is self-canceling because melting ice absorbs latent heat and cools the ocean. As polar ice melts, the resultant re-distribution of the earth’s mass slows down its rotational speed. In the 40-year period studied, earth’s rotational speed was thus slowed by 0.00000004%.
6. 1983, EPA GIVES GLOOMY PREDICTIONS ON GREENHOUSE EFFECT: The world is powerless to prevent a greenhouse effect that will dramatically alter food production and living patterns. Instead of fighting the inevitable world leaders should be planning how to cope with its catastrophic impact. Coastal cities without sea-walls will be flooded. The climate of NYC will be like the climate now found in Florida. The US wheat belt will move northward. All because of global warming caused by a buildup of carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. By the year 2100 these changes will produce catastrophic results. We should respond to this challenge with a sense of urgency. The warming process now set in place is irreversible and the dire predictions of global warming can only be delayed by a few years even with Draconian restrictions on fossil fuels. By the year 2000 the temperature could be 1.1 degrees higher, 3.6 degrees higher by 2040, and 9 degrees higher by 2100. The temperature rise in the poles will be three times higher melting the polar ice caps and causing sea levels to rise 3.5 inches by 2000, one foot by 2025, and five feet by 2100. More research is needed for better planning to cope with the changes.
7. 1985, RISING SEA LEVEL, The Polar Research Board of the National Academy of Sciences says that the sea level will rise 4-6 cm by 2000 and 12-27 cm by 2030 because global warming from the greenhouse effect will warm the oceans and melt glaciers and polar ice caps including Greenland.
8. 1988, CLIMATE CHANGE ALREADY HAPPENING, A buildup of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels  emitted by human activities into is causing the earth’s surface to warm by trapping infrared radiation from the sun and turning the entire earth into a kind of greenhouse – just as mathematical models had  predicted. Sometime between 2025 to 2050 the earth will be 3F to 9F warmer with higher latitudes 20F warmer. mathematical models had  predicted. Melting glaciers and polar ice and thermal expansion of the oceans will cause the sea level to rise by one to four feet by 2050.
9. 1990, SCIENTIFIC CONSENSUS CONFIRMS GLOBAL WARMING (NYT) Global warming will cause serious environmental damage starting early in the next century long before the maximum predicted temperature is reached. We must set limits beyond which the global temperature and sea level should not be permitted to rise to avoid serious and ever increasing risks posed by the continued flow of heat trapping gases into the atmosphere at present rates. The IPCC report serves as a prelude to the Second World Climate Conference in Geneva later this year.
10. 1990, EXPERTS WARN ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING COSTS. A UN panel of international climate experts came out to strongly support the global warming theory saying that the buildup of CO2 from fossil fuel consumption lead to rising temperatures worldwide, altered weather patterns, lower food production, and rising sea levels. In the long run the cost of inaction exceeds the cost of mitigation. The panel put political pressure on President Bush who is not inclined to take costly measures against CO2 as long as there are credible scientists who oppose the global warming theory and as long as there is no “scientific consensus” on the issue. 
11. 1993, CLINTON ADMINISTRATION: “CLIMATE CHANGE ACTION PLAN”. Emissions of CO2, CH4, NO, and CFC have caused temperatures to rise by 0.5C in the last 100 years, and unchecked, global warming could cause melting glaciers and polar ice caps, rising sea level, flooded coastal areas,droughts, damaged ecosystems, and reduced agricultural production. The Clinton administration’s Action Plan proposes 44 action steps to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to 1990 levels by the year 2000 mainly by voluntary participation of business and industry. The plan is consistent with international efforts outlined by the Earth Summit in 1992. 
12. 1993, RISING SEAS A PRECISE MEASURE OF GLOBAL WARMING. Using the most accurate system ever devised for measuring global sea levels,scientists have found a steady rise of 3 mm per year for the past two years. These data now establish beyond any doubt that the greenhouse effect is causing global warming. If this trend continues for another few years it will be solid evidence of a warming trend related to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Doubts about the reliability of older and less precise temperature data may now be put aside as the very accurate sea level data clearly establishes the scientific basis of global warming. The sea level measurement satellite of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory takes 500,000 sea level measurements per day. 
13. 1995, GLOBAL WARMING RESUMED IN 1994, CLIMATE DATA SHOW
    After a three year hiatus and a bitter winter in 1993-1994, the warming trend has returned with a warmer than usual winter in 1994-1995. Global warming is not gone, it was just temporarily interrupted by the 1991 eruption of Mount Pinatubo. Aerosols in the upper atmosphere from the eruption reflected sunlight and cooled the earth. In 1994, temperatures rebounded to the levels of the 1980s – the warmest decade on record –reaching the record high of 60C reached in 1990. Global temperatures from March to December were the warmest since 1951. The mainstream view among researchers on climatic change is that atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases could double by the end of the next century and that this could produce a global warming of 1.5C to 4.5C. By comparison, the earth is 3C to 5C warmer now than in the last ice age, which ended about 10,000 years ago. A 2C warming,could cause ice at the poles to melt, rising sea levels, shifting climatic zones, and more extreme floods, droughts, storms, and cold and heat waves. Violent and frequent weather extremes have become more common since 1980.
14. 1996, UN IPCC REPORT Ahead of Geneva, the second follow up meeting on global warming after the Earth Summit in Rio, the UN IPCC has issued a report that says that humans are influencing global climate. Excerpts from the report issued in June 1996 say that Earth’s temperature will rise by 2C in the next 100 years with serious negative effects. Extreme temperatures will become normal. Habitats will change. Many plants and animals will become extinct. Some regions will suffer water shortages. Polar ice will melt. The sea level will rise. Emissions of greenhouse gases that trap solar energy will double by the year 2010. A 50% reduction in emissions over the next 50 years is needed to reverse the warming trend. We are currently not on track to meet emission reduction guidelines set in the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio. Yet the Rio commitments are not enough to halt global warming.
15. 1997, THE CASE FOR THE KYOTO PROTOCOL
    Twenty years of hard data from meteorological stations and nature show a clear warming trend. Growth rings in Mongolian and Canadian trees are getting wider. Butterflies in California are moving to higher ground once too cold for butterflies. Stalactites in Britain are growing faster. The growing season for crops in Australia is getting longer. Permafrost in Siberia and Canada is melting. The evidence is there anywhere you look. A warming rate is one 1C per century is enough to wreak havoc. The cause is the greenhouse effect of CO2 emissions from fossil fuels as well as CFCs and HCFCs that trap heat. The effect is being compounded as deforestation simultaneously removes trees that absorb CO2. This conclusion rests on the results from sophisticated computer simulation models that give the best possible information on this topic even though they are not perfect. These models are giving us scary accounts of the future and we should be paying attention. The IPCC tell us that melting ice and thermal expansion of oceans will cause the sea level to rise one meter by 2037 and inundate low lying areas and island nations. Extreme weather events will become common. El Nino and La Nina cycles will become more extreme. There will be millions of climate refugees driven from their home by global warming. Some regions of the world will become hotter, others colder, some wetter, others drier. Entire weather systems will be dramatically altered. The Gulf Stream will switch off making Europe colder. Tropical diseases such as malaria will ravage the world as vectors migrate to higher latitudes and altitudes. Some wheat farmers may be able to grow more wheat but the net effect of global warming is overwhelmingly negative.
16. 1997, SCIENTISTS WARN KYOTO DELEGATES
    “Without reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, scientists warn that carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could double in the next century, warming the atmosphere and triggering an environmental chain reaction that could raise sea levels, change ocean currents and intensify damage from storms, droughts and the spread of tropical diseases” (CNN).
17. 1998, WORLD DEBATES GLOBAL WARMING
    Climate scientists in the Hadley Center on Climate Change have issued a report on global warming timed to coincide with the meeting in Buenos Aires where delegates from 180 nations are meeting to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The findings of the report based on a computer model for the case with no emission reductions are as follows: 1998 will be UK’s hottest year since 1106, “the warmest year of the millennium”; sometime between 2041 and 2070 we will see a sharp rise in sick, hungry, and thirsty people; by 2048 the world’s forests will become so degraded that they will change from net CO2 sinks to net CO2 producers further accelerating global warming; human greenhouse gas emissions have contributed substantially to global warming over the past half century; the climate model is validated by its ability to reconstruct the last 150 years of climate conditions; the 1997-1998 ElNino is the most extreme on record; in the next 100 years global temperatures will rise by 6C – the most extreme in the last 10,000 years. The Amazon forest will die out and rot releasing carbon dioxide. Tropical grasslands will be transformed into deserts. For the first half of the 21st century, vegetation will absorb CO2 at a rate of about 2-3 GtC per year while human emissions of CO2 are about 7GtC a year. From 2050 onwards, vegetation dying under the impact of climate change will itself add about 2GtC a year to greenhouse emissions, further intensifying global warming. Global warming will accelerat due to “positive feedback” – a way by which the global warming we have caused will itself cause further global warming. More than 170 million people will suffer from water shortage. Crop yields will increase in areas like Canada and Europe, but nearer the equator they will shrink. Some 18% more of Africa’s people will be at risk of hunger simply because of climate change. Sea levels will rise by 21 cm inundating 20 million people. Malaria infection will increase, and spread to areas where it is not currently seen. The overwhelming consensus of scientific opinion is that climate change is real, and that we are playing the chief part in causing it. The report confirms previous findings of the panel of scientists at the IPCC, “the world’s most authoritative group of climatologists”.
18. 2000, GLOBAL WARMING IS THE RESULT OF HUMAN ACTIVITY
    According to an IPCC panel of scientists, human activities that release greenhouse gases like CO2 into the atmosphere are at least partially responsible for global warming because greenhouse gases trap heat reflected from the surface of the earth. The consequent global warming will raise surface temperature by between 1C and 3.5C by the year 2100. The warming will cause melting ice and thermal expansion of the oceans and raise sea levels by between one and three feet and flood coastal areas. There will be an increase in the intensity and frequency of extreme weather such as storms,droughts, and floods. Tropical diseases will spread into a pandemic. Plants and animals that fail to adapt to these changes will die off in waves of extinctions and loss of biodiversity.
19. 2001, GLOBAL WARMING MAY TRIGGER ABRUPT CLIMATE CHANGE
    A report by the National Research Council (USA) says that global warming may trigger climate changes so abrupt that ecosystems will not be able to adapt. Look for local or short term cooling, floods, droughts, and other unexpected changes. A growing CO2 concentration in the atmosphere due to the use of fossil fuels is to blame. Some regional climates have changed by as much as 10C in 10 years. Antarctica’s largest glaciers are rapidly thinning, and in the last 10 years have lost up to 150 feet of thickness in some places, enough to raise global sea levels by 0.4 mm. Global warming is a real problem and it is getting worse.
20. 2004, GRIM SIGNS OF GLOBAL WARMING
    Global warming has unleashed massive ecological changes that are already under way. These changes are ushering in a grim future including massive species extinctions, an elevation of sea levels by 3 feet, wholesale changes to the Arctic, and disruptions to the earth’s life support system. These changes should serve as a wake up call to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
21. 2004, ARCTIC CLIMATE IMPACT ASSESSMENT
    An unprecedented 4-year study of the Arctic shows that polar bears, walruses, and some seals are becoming extinct. Arctic summer sea ice may disappear entirely. Combined with a rapidly melting Greenland ice sheet, it will raise the sea level 3 feet by 2100 inundating lowlands from Florida to Bangladesh. Average winter temperatures in Alaska and the rest of the Arctic are projected to rise an additional 7 to 13 degrees over the next 100 years because of increasing emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities. The area is warming twice as fast as anywhere else because of global air circulation patterns and natural feedback loops, such as less ice reflecting sunlight, leading to increased warming at ground level and more ice melt. Native peoples’ ways of life are threatened. Animal migration patterns have changed, and the thin sea ice and thawing tundra make it too dangerous for humans to hunt and travel.
22. 2004, GLOBAL WARMING TO MELT GREENLAND ICE SHEET
    A meltdown of the massive ice sheet, which is more than 3km-thick would raise sea levels by an average seven meters, threatening countries such as Bangladesh, certain islands in the Pacific and some parts of Florida. Greenland’s huge ice sheet could melt within the next thousand years if emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2)
    and global warming are not reduced.
23. 2004, RAPID ARCTIC WARMING BRINGS SEA LEVEL RISE
    The Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) report says: increasing greenhouse gases from human activities is causing the Arctic to warm twice as fast as the rest of the planet; in Alaska, western Canada, and eastern Russia winter temperatures have risen by 2C to 4C in the last 50 years; the Arctic will warm by 4C to 7C by 2100. A portion of Greenland’s ice sheet will melt; global sea levels will rise; global warming will intensify. Greenland contains enough melting ice to raise sea levels by 7 meters; Bangkok, Manila, Dhaka, Florida, Louisiana, and New Jersey are at risk of inundation; thawing permafrost and rising seas threaten Arctic coastal regions; climate change will accelerate and bring about profound ecological and social changes; the Arctic is experiencing the most rapid and severe climate change on earth and it’s going to get a lot worse; Arctic summer sea ice will decline by 50% to 100%; polar bears will be driven towards extinction; this report is an urgent SOS for the Arctic; forest fires and insect infestations will increase in frequency and intensity; changing vegetation and rising sea levels will shrink the tundra to its lowest level in 21000 years; vanishing breeding areas for birds and grazing areas for animals will cause extinctions of many species; “if we limit emission of heat trapping carbon dioxide we can still help protect the Arctic and slow global warming”.
24. 2007: A PLAN TO SAVE BANGKOK FROM GLOBAL WARMING’S SEA LEVEL RISE
    It has been more than a year now that scientists and climate experts sought a budget of 100 billion baht to build a sea wall 80 kilometers long from the mouth of the Ta Chin river to the Bang Pakong river to protect the city of Bangkok from being inundated by the sea that was projected to rise by 20 cm per year due to man-made global warming. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/02/reference-group-floats-plan-to-keep.html
25. 2007: SCIENTISTS SAY THAT SEA LEVELS WILL RISE BY 7 METERS IN 100 YEARS
    Climate scientists say that at the current rate of increase in the use of fossil fuels, the sea level would rise by 7 meters in 100 years and devastate low-lying countries like Bangladesh. When these estimates were challenged and their internal inconsistencies exposed, the IPCC quietly revised the 100-year forecast downward 100-fold from 7 meters to 7 centimeters on their website but the news media alarm about 7 meters continued unabated with “thousands of years” quietly inserted in place of “100 years. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2007/12/reference-melting-greenland-ice-sheet.html
26. 2007: INDONESIA: FLOODS, DROUGHTS, LANDSLIDES, AND SEA LEVEL RISE
    Scientists say that an effect of greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels is that droughts, floods, landslides, and rising sea levels are becoming commonplace in Indonesia. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2007/12/reference-crunch-is-in-mandatory-limits_9192.html
27. 2008: IMMINENT COLLAPSE OF PETERMANN GLACIER IN GREENLAND 
    Climate scientists looking through satellite pictures found a crack in the Petermann glacier in Greenland and concluded that it could speed up sea level rise because huge chunks of ice the size of Manhattan were hemorrhaging off. Other scientists who has been travelling to Greenland for years to study glaciers say that the crack in the glacier is normal and not different from other cracks seen in the 1990s. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2008/09/reference-worrisome-cracks-in-ice.html
28. 2008: BANGKOK IS BEING INUNDATED BY SEA LEVEL RISE 
    The city of Bangkok is sinking due to subsidence. This is a real problem and its real causes must be addressed for a solution. It is cruel opportunism for climate scientists to use this tragedy to sell their man-made global warming agenda. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2008/07/reference-great-flood-bangkok-post-july.html
29. 2008: ASIA HIT HARD BY CLIMATE CHANGE IMPACTS
    Climate scientists say that man-made global warming has caused a rise in the sea level and an increase in the frequency and intensity of natural disasters in Asia. They cite the recent cyclone in Burma, a typhoon in the Philippines, and the earthquake in China. It is implied that these events could have been avoided or moderated had we not used fossil fuels. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2008/07/reference-world-bank-says-asian-cities.html
30. 2008: SEA LEVEL RISE INUNDATES ATOLL AND CREATES CLIMATE REFUGEES
    Climate scientists say that man-made global warming has caused a rise in the sea level sufficient to inundate an atoll in Kiribati, a chain of 33 such islands, and created climate refugees. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2008/06/reference-atoll-leader-asks-australia.html
31. 2009: SOUTHEAST ASIA HIT WITH SEA LEVEL RISE 
    It is reported that “Southeast Asia is facing problems from rising sea levels that bring more frequent flooding in coastal zones and river basins” (Thai firms not ready for climate change, Bangkok Post, January 22, 2009). It is noteworthy that none of these flooding events has been reported in the media. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/01/reference-thai-firms-not-ready-for.html
32. 2009: SEA LEVEL RISE CAUSING COASTAL EROSION IN PHUKET, THAILAND
    It is reported that an increase in coastal erosion observed this year in Phuket, Thailand, is due to rising sea levels caused by man-made global warming. Phuket is on the Andaman side of the isthmus of Thailand. Nearby is the Koh-Tapao sea level measuring station monitored by the University of Hawaii sea level database. The time series of these data from 1996 to 2008 do not show any trend. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/01/reference-coastline-lost-to-rising-seas.html
33. 2009: OUR USE OF FOSSIL FUELS IS CAUSING GREENLAND GLACIERS TO MELT
    Man-made global warming is causing Greenland’s glaciers to melt at an alarming rate. By the year 2100 all the ice there will have melted causing a calamitous rise in the sea level that will inundate Bangladesh, the Maldives, Bangkok, New Orleans, and atolls in the Pacific. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/01/reference-greenland-meltoff-not-so-fast.html
34. 2009: COLLAPSE OF THE WEST ANTARCTIC ICE SHELF
    New data show that the West Antarctic ice shelf collapses every 40,000 years or so and that this cyclical process has been regular feature of this ice shelf for millions of years (Antarctica ice collapses were regular, Bangkok Post, March 19, 2009). These melting episodes can raise the sea level by as much as 5 meters but the process takes a thousand years or more. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/03/reference-antarctica-ice-collapses-were.html
35. 2009: SEA LEVEL RISE DUE TO GLOBAL WARMING IS FLOODING BANGKOK
    Bangkok is sinking at about 2 or 3 cm per year and this phenomenon is blamed for the increasing severity of floods that occur when a rain swollen Chao Phraya River coincides with unusually high tides. These flooding incidents cannot be related to global warming or sea level rise. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/03/reference-bangkok-seeks-dutch-help-to.html
36. 2009: SEA LEVEL RISE OF SEVERAL METERS BY 2100
    After sustained criticism from skeptics, climate scientists have revised their forecast for the rise in sea levels by the year 2100 from 5 meters to 38 cm. In releasing the rather innocuous new figure the scientists had to try extra hard to maintain the fear level saying that the lower figure does not mean we are safe and that things could turn out to be much worse. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/07/reference-study-confirms-rising-sea.html
37. 2009: CATASTROPHIC ICE MELT NEEDS TREATY AT COPENHAGEN
    Carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels have caused the following alarming changes to our planet: (1) ice covering the Arctic Ocean shrank in 2007 to its smallest since satellite records began, (2) In Antarctica, a section of the Wilkins Ice Shelf has broken up in recent days, (3) glaciers in the Himalayan mountains are shrinking and threatening to disrupt water supplies to hundreds of millions of people, (4) melting permafrost in Siberia will release large quantities of methane into the atmosphere and hasten global warming, and (5) if all of the land based ice in Antarctica melted it would raise the sea level by 80 meters. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/04/reference-melting-ice-to-spur-new.html
38. 2009: GLOBAL WARMING = REGIONAL WARMING IN SE ASIA
    Although climate science presents climate change as a global issue with global emissions changing global language, the ADB tries to trick SE Asian non-Annex countries into climate action with a report that implies that climate change in SE Asia is responsive to emissions from SE Asia and if no action is taken climate change will lead to decreasing rainfall and millions will suffer from water shortages”; “Rice production will decline threatening food security”; “Forests will turn into scrub land”; “Floods, droughts, cyclones, and other extreme weather events will become common”; “Deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory disease, malaria, and dengue fever will increase”; “Sea levels will rise by 70 cm or more inundating entire islands and low lying areas”; and the biggest lie of all, “All of these dangers may be mitigated by reducing CO2 emissions from fossil fuels”. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/04/reference-there-are-lies-damn-lies-and.html
39. 2009: CLIMATE SCIENTISTS INVENT THE PHRASE “RAPID SEA LEVEL RISE”
    Climate scientists say that climate action has become urgent because of the possibility of rapid sea level rise. We are urged to reduce “greenhouse gas emissions” from fossil fuels because in prior interglacial periods the sea level had risen by as much as 3 meters in 100 years and so we should expect it do so again in the interglacial period in which we now live. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/04/reference-rapid-sea-level-rise.html
40. 2009: BANGLADESH BEING INUNDATED BY RAPID SEA LEVEL RISE
    The oft repeated claim that Bangladesh is being inundated by rising sea levels caused by man-made climate change ignores the relevant data that the total land mass of the country is not decreasing. In fact, the total land mass of Bangladesh is increasing just as it always has by virtue of silt deposition. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/04/reference-taming-waters-of-bangladesh.html
41. 2009: USE OF FOSSIL FUELS CAUSING GREENLAND’S GLACIERS TO MELT
    In 2005 two glaciers in Greenland were found to be moving faster than they were in 2001. Scientists concluded from these data that the difference observed was a a long term trend of glacial melt in Greenland and that carbon dioxide was the cause of this trend. The assumed trend was then extrapolated forward and we were told that carbon dioxide would cause the land based ice mass of Greenland to be discharged to the sea and raise the sea level by six meters. They said that the only way out of the devastation was to drastically reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels. However, in 2009, just before a meeting in Copenhagen where these deep cuts in emissions were to be negotiated, it was found that the glaciers had returned to their normal rate of discharge. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/09/reference-effect-of-carbon-dioxide.html
42. 2009: FOSSIL FUELED SEA LEVEL RISE IS INUNDATING SHANGHAI, CHINA
    Climate scientists say that sea level rise due to man-made global warming is causing Shanghai to be inundated with sea water. The truth is that the inundation problem in Shanghai was first noted and measured by geologists back in 1921 when atmospheric carbon dioxide was below 300 ppm. The problem is attributed to subsidence caused by the removal of ground water and the weight of the buildings in the downtown area of the city. The subsidence continues to this day and it is estimated that Shanghai is sinking at an annual rate of about one cm per year. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/10/reference-rising-cities-threaten.html
43. 2009: THE ARCTIC WILL BE ICE FREE IN SUMMER BY 2029
    An alarm is raised that the extreme summer melt of Arctic sea ice in 2007 was caused by humans using fossil fuels and it portends that in 20 years human caused global warming will leave the Arctic Ocean ice-free in the summer raising sea levels and harming wildlife. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/10/reference-arctic-will-be-ice-free-in-20.html
44. 2009: SEA LEVEL RISE SINKING SOUTH PACIFIC ATOLLS 
    Our use of fossil fuels causes global warming. Global warming causes sea level rise. Sea level rise causes South Pacific atolls to become inundated. The inundation of these islands creates climate refugees. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/10/worlds-first-climate-refugees-age-july.html
45. 2009: WARMING OCEANS MELT GREENLAND GLACIERS
    Some glaciers on north and northeast Greenland terminate in fiords with long glacier tongues that extend into the sea. It is found that the warming of the oceans caused by our use of fossil fuels is melting these tongues and raising the specter of devastation by sea level rise. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/10/reference-warming-ocean-melts-greenland.html
46. 2009: SEA LEVEL RISE IS INUNDATING SAMUT PRAKAN, THAILAND
    Encroachment by sea water in the Bangkok Groundwater Area, that includes Samut Prakan, is a well known effect of land subsidence caused by ground water extraction unrelated to carbon dioxide emissions, global warming, or climate change. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/12/reference-what-and-where-is-our-climate.html
47. 2009: DESTRUCTION ON A GLOBAL SCALE WITH SEA LEVEL RISE
    Bangladesh is a low lying delta where the Ganges, the Brahmaputra, and other Indian rivers drain. Over the last few decades an explosive growth of shrimp farming along the coast and construction of irrigation dams upstream in India has caused coastal salinity to move further upstream causing considerable harm to agriculture. This tragedy is now claimed by climate science as an impact of fossil fueled global warming by way of rising seas. Yet, if rising seas were the cause of the salinity problem, the land area of Bangladesh would be shrinking – but it is growing. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/12/reference-destruction-on-global-level.html
48. 2009: ANTARCTICA TO LOSING BILLIONS OF TONS OF ICE
    Our carbon dioxide emissions are causing the East Antarctic ice shelf to lose 57 billion tonnes of ice per year and that if CO2 emissions are not reduced this process could raise sea levels by 5 meters. More info: http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2009/11/reference-ice-loss-at-billions-of-tons.html
49. 2010: RISING SEA LEVEL SINKS COASTAL ISLAND IN BANGLADESH
    Climate science says that fossil fueled global warming is causing ice to melt and sea levels to rise and that the destruction that this process can cause is already evident in that the ocean has taken back an island from Bangladesh. (Note: New Moore Island, Talpatti in local lingo, is one of many evanescent islands that come and go on the coast of this delta nation but in the net land is gained not lost). More info here http://chaamjamal.blogspot.com/2010/03/reference-rising-sea-levels-sinks-new.html
50. 2019: Greenland is currently losing 3bn tonnes of ice every day, roughly three times the average for mid-June in 1981-2010
51. 2019: Greenland was FORTY degrees above normal. Sea level rise should scare the hell out of you. This is not a problem for future generations. This isn’t a problem twenty years in the future. Climate breakdown is happening NOW.

52. 2019: Eric Holthaus‏Verified account @EricHolthaus Jun 13

    The Greenland ice sheet is currently going through a major melting this week, covering almost half its surface — unprecedented in its extent for this early in the year. This has not happened before.

[HOME PAGE]

FIGURE 1: SILSO SUNSPOT DATA 1750-2018: ANNUAL TIME SCALE

FIGURE 2: SILSO SUNSPOT DATA 1750-2018: 11-YEAR MOVING AVERAGES

FIGURE 3: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CET AND SILSO: ANNUAL TIME SCALE

FIGURE 4: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CET AND SILSO: 11-YEAR TIME SCALE

FIGURE 5: RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CET AND SILSO: 22-YEAR TIME SCALE

FIGURE 6: CORRELATION BETWEEN CET AND SILSO AT THREE TIME SCALES

FIGURE 7: REGRESSION RESULTS

FIGURE 8: CET EFFECT OF TIME SPAN ON CORRELATION 

FIGURE 9: BERKELEY&HADCRUT 1880-2018: CORR & DETCORR

FIGURE 10: CORRELATION SUMMARY STATISTICS

[HOME PAGE]

1. This post is an empirical study of the claimed relationship between sunspot numbers and surface temperature in terms of the SILSO sunspot data and the Central England Temperature series 1750-2018.
2. The history of astronomical research in sunspot numbers is presented by John Eddy (see bibliography below) as follows:  Dark spots were seen on the face of the sun as early as the 4th century BC but it wasn’t until the invention of the telescope in 1610 that they were seen well enough to be counted and tracked. It took 230 years of these data for scientists to identify and track their cyclical behavior. In 1843, Heinrich Schwabe, an amateur astronomist, published a short paper on the cyclical behavior of sunspots 1826-1843 and reported a decadal periodicity. In 1848 Rudolph Wolf organized a number of European observatories to record sunspot counts in a consistent standardized way and on a regular basis. This international effort continues today. Wolf also organized older data into the 1848 format and extended the data time series back in time. The post 1848 data are more reliable. Sunspot counts are important indicators of solar activity cycles.
3. The 70-year cold period 1645-1715 in the midst of the Little Ice Age is generally recognized as the Maunder Minimum event named after husband and wife astronomers Edward and Annie Maunder.  It is recorded that during this event, sunspot numbers were at historical lows in a 28-year span 1672-1699. Both time spans are coincident with coldest period of the Little Ice Age (LIA) described in a related post [LINK] . It is thought that the low temperature of this period is causally related to the low sunspot count recorded by the Maunders. 
4. There is a renewed interest in the apparent relationship between surface temperature and the solar cycle implied by the Maunder Minimum in the era of Anthropogenic Global Warming and climate change (AGW) in which proponents say that fossil fuel emissions of the industrial economy have caused atmospheric CO2 to rise and that rise in turn is imposing an artificial and possibly catastrophic rate of warming by way of the long wave absorption property of CO2 [LINK] . 
5. Some skeptics of AGW have proposed that that AGW scientists have mistaken a solar cycle effect as a CO2 effect and that this theory will be proven true when surface temperature falls again, as it had done in the LIA, into a “new ice age” in the solar cycle minimum expected at some unspecified time soon after 2019. This post is an evaluation of this proposal. The solar cycle theory temperature trends implies that surface temperature is responsive to the solar cycle. The implied relationship is tested with correlation and regression analysis of the long run Central England Temperature series (1750-2018) against the corresponding sunspot data from SILSO. 
6. Figure 1 and Figure 2 are graphical representations of the sunspot data used in the study. The calendar months are studied separately as it is found that the behavior of both time series (sunspots and CET) used in this work vary significantly among the calendar months. It is proposed that the usual procedure of combining calendar months into annual means causes this information to be lost. Accordingly, both of the charts, Figure 1 and Figure 2, present the data separately one calendar month at a time in a GIF format that cycles through the twelve calendar months. The data are presented at an annual time scale in Figure 1 and at an eleven year time scale in Figure 2 as moving 11-year means.
7. In addition to the annual time scale, both 11-year and 22-year time scales are studied in this work in accordance with a claim by solar cycle driven climate theorist John Casey [LINK] that the effect of the solar cycle on temperature is cumulative such that it is necessary to study this relationship at a 11-year or even 22-year time scale.
8. Figure 3, Figure 4, and Figure 5 are graphical representations of the correlation between surface temperature (y-axis) and sunspot count (x-axis). They differ in the time scale used with the time scale set to annual in Figure 3, 11 years in Figure 4, and 22 years in Figure 5. As in the previous charts, these figures are GIF animations that cycle through the twelve calendar months. There is little or no relationship seen at the annual time scale in these charts but some evidence of correlation is seen at the longer time scales and these correlations appear to differ among the calendar months.
9. Figure 6 is a presentation of the computed correlations and detrended correlations at all three time scales. The importance of detrended correlation is that it represents responsiveness at the time scale of interest net of the effect of shared long full span trends as described in a related post [LINK] . We conclude from Figure 6 that no correlation is found at the annual time scale and that apparently significant positive correlation exists at both of the longer time scales. In both cases, much if not all of the correlation survives into the detrended series. Such survival is interpreted in terms of the strength of the correlation as an indicator of responsiveness at the that time scale.
10. Figure 7 is a summary of Regression analysis of these relationships along with hypothesis tests for statistical significance at α=0.001 ({Johnson, Valen E. “Revised standards for statistical evidence.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110.48 (2013): 19313-19317.} The summary shows that no correlation is found at the annual time scale. Additionally we see that the average of the regression coefficients for the calendar months is β=0.001 meaning that a 100-point change in sunspot counts would have a temperature effect of 0.1C if the correlation were statistically significant.
11. The bottom half of Figure 7 (copy below) presents substantial findings and the relevant portion of this study. The twelve calendar months are presented separately and statistically significant results are colored red. At the 11-year time scale, statistically significant correlations are found in 5 of the 12 calendar months (April, June, July, August, and December. At the longer time scale of 22 months, in addition to these 5 calendar months, statistically significant correlations are also found in September and October. These results taken together are taken as empirical evidence of a positive surface-temperature effect of the sunspot cycle. The average regression coefficients of the statistically significant months indicate that the magnitude of the temperature effect is 0.5C for a 100-point change in the sunspot count. In Figure 2, we find that a change in sunspot counts of that magnitude can occur in 40 or 50 years. Such changes imply warming or cooling at a rates of as high as 0.05C per year.
12. The relationship between the solar cycle and surface temperature is described by NASA in a 2001 document available online [LINK] . The document describes the relationship between sunspot counts and temperature in terms of the 22-year time scale shown in Figure 5. The mechanism for the temperature effect is explained in terms of the known upper atmospheric effects of low solar activity in terms of lower ozone production. Lower ozone in turn changed planetary waves. The change in planetary waves changed the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) into its negative phase channeling winter Atlantic winter storms towards Europe. It is in this way that NASA climate scientist Drew Shindell was able to use a climate model to connect low solar activity in the Maunder Minimum to the Little Ice Age in Europe. The complete NASA document is posted as item #20 in the bibliography below.
13. Figure 8 compares the correlation and detrended correlation of 11-year temperature and sunspot number moving averages for the shorter 139-year time span 1880-2018 against the 270-year full span 1749-2018. The comparison shows significantly lower correlations for the shorter time span from the year 1880. In terms of the average for all twelve calendar months, the correlation of the 270-year time span is +0.138 compared with -0.092 for the 139-year time span. The corresponding detrended correlation averages are +0.071 and -0.156. These comparisons imply that the temperature effects of the solar cycle may be time span sensitive in that the effect is seen more clearly in longer time spans. Further tests with different temperature data are planned.
14. Figure 9 compares correlation and detrended correlation at the shorter 1880-2018 time span for two popular surface temperature reconstructions (Berkeley and Hadcrut). The correlations and detrended correlations are very similar and correspond well with the values for CET at the shorter time span. Summary statistics for the correlations in Figure 8 and Figure 9 are tabulated in Figure 10.

CONCLUSIONS:  The responsiveness of the CET to the sunspot cycle is tested over the study period 1750 to 2018. No correlation is found at an annual time scale but significant effects are found at the longer time scales of 11 and 22 years. Regression analysis indicates that the temperature effect is sufficient to explain warming and cooling rates of 0.005C per unit change in cumulative 11-year or 22-year sunspot number averages. The implied temperature trend of a 100-point change over a 50-year period is therefore approximately 0.01C/year. This rate is significant in that it is equivalent to 1C/century although that time scale is well outside the sunspot cycle. The finding is consistent with the many works of Judith Lean and Henrik Svensmark that imply a relationship between temperature and the solar cycle. These works are listed in the bibliography below. It is acknowledged that the CET may not be representative of global temperature because of its land based and extreme northern location. The existence of Hurst persistence in the sunspot cycle described in a related post may imply that the observed effects in this work may not be found in all time spans. Further study is planned. 

1. A bibliography of sunspot cycle studies is presented below. The bibliography includes significant works of Judith Lean.
2. A noteworthy paper in the bibliography is Beer, Jürg, Steven Tobias, and Nigel Weiss. “An active Sun throughout the Maunder minimum.” Solar Physics 181.1 (1998): 237-249.  The paper raises the interesting question that if the onset of the LIA is ascribed to the Maunder Minimum then why did the continuation of the solar cycle through the LIA not change the climate?
3. The full text of an unpublished work of Judith Lean, not listed below, is made available in pdf format here  judithLean. 
4. A related post on sunspot numbers presents evidence of chaotic behavior in sunspot time series that can be ascribed to Hurst persistence in the data at an annual time scale. This finding implies that historical sunspot cycle behavior may not be reproducible and may not have a coherent and deterministic interpretation at very brief time scales [LINK] . It is not likely that this behavior exists at the longer time scales used in this study. 

[HOME PAGE]

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Eddy, John A. “The maunder minimum.” Science4245 (1976): 1189-1202.  Dark spots were seen on the face of the sun as early as the 4th century BC but it wasn’t until the invention of the telescope in 1610that they were seen well enough to be counted and tracked. It took 230 years of these data for scientists to identify and track their cyclical behavior. In 1843, Heinrich Schwabe, an amateur astronomist, published a short paper on the cyclical behavior of sunspots 1826-1843 and reported a decadal periodicity. In 1848 Rudolph Wolf organized a number of European observatories to record sunspot counts in a consistent standardized way and on a regular basis. This international effort continues today. Wolf also organized older data into the 1848 format and extended the data time series back in time. The post 1848 data are more reliable. … more….
2. Eddy, John A. “Climate and the changing sun.” Climatic Change 1.2 (1977): 173-190.  Long-term changes in the level of solar activity are found in historical records and in fossil radiocarbon in tree-rings. Typical of these changes are the Maunder Minimum (A.D. 1645–1715), the Spörer Minimum (A.D. 1400–1510), and a Medieval Maximum (c. A.D. 1120–1280). Eighteen such features are identified in the tree-ring radiocarbon record of the past 7500 years and compared with a record of world climate. In every case when long-term solar activity falls, mid-latitude glaciers advance and climate cools; at times of high solar activity glaciers recede and climate warms. We propose that changes in the level of solar activity and in climate may have a common cause: slow changes in the solar constant, of about 1% amplitude.
3. Friis-Christensen, Eigil, and Knud Lassen. “Length of the solar cycle: an indicator of solar activity closely associated with climate.” Science5032 (1991): 698-700.  It has recently been suggested that the solar irradiance has varied in phase with the 80- to 90-year period represented by the envelope of the 11-year sunspot cycle and that this variation is causing a significant part of the changes in the global temperature.This interpretation has been criticized for statistical reasons and because there are no observations that indicate significant changes in the solar irradiance. A set of data that supports the suggestion of a direct influence of solar activity on global climate is the variation of the solar cycle length. This record closely matches the long-term variations of the Northern Hemisphere land air temperature during the past 130 years.
4. Lean, Judith, Andrew Skumanich, and Oran White. “Estimating the Sun’s radiative output during the Maunder Minimum.” Geophysical Research Letters 19.15 (1992): 1591-1594. The coincidence between the Maunder Minimum of solar magnetic activity from 1645 to 1715 and the coldest temperatures of the Little Ice Age raises the question of possible solar forcing of the Earth’s climate. Using a correlation which we find between measured total solar irradiance (corrected for sunspot effects) and a Ca II surrogate for bright magnetic features, we estimate the Sun’s radiative output in the absence of such features to be 1365.43 w/m², or 0.15% below its mean value of 1367.54 W/m² measured during the period 1980 to 1986 by the ACRIM experiment. Observations of extant solar‐type stars suggest that the Ca II surrogate vas darker during the Maunder Minimum. Allowing for this, we estimate the total solar irradiance to be 1364.28 W/m² or 0.24% below its mean value for the 1980 to 1986 period. The decrease in the global equilibrium temperature of the Earth due to a decrease of 0.24% in total solar irradiance lies in the range from 0.2° C to 0.6° C, which can be compared with the approximately 1° C cooling experienced during the Little Ice Age, relative to the present. 
   
5. Hoyt, Douglas V., and Kenneth H. Schatten. “A discussion of plausible solar irradiance variations, 1700‐” Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics98.A11 (1993): 18895-18906.  From satellite observations the solar total irradiance is known to vary. Sunspot blocking, facular emission, and network emission are three identified causes for the variations. In this paper we examine several different solar indices measured over the past century that are potential proxy measures for the Sun’s irradiance. These indices are (1) the equatorial solar rotation rate, (2) the sunspot structure, the decay rate of individual sunspots, and the number of sunspots without umbrae, and (3) the length and decay rate of the sunspot cycle. Each index can be used to develop a model for the Sun’s total irradiance as seen at the Earth. Three solar indices allow the irradiance to be modeled back to the mid‐1700s. The indices are (1) the length of the solar cycle, (2) the normalized decay rate of the solar cycle, and (3) the mean level of solar activity. All the indices are well correlated, and one possible explanation for their nearly simultaneous variations is changes in the Sun’s convective energy transport. Although changes in the Sun’s convective energy transport are outside the realm of normal stellar structure theory (e.g., mixing length theory), one can imagine variations arising from even the simplest view of sunspots as vertical tubes of magnetic flux, which would serve as rigid pillars affecting the energy flow patterns by ensuring larger‐scale eddies. A composite solar irradiance model, based upon these proxies, is compared to the northern hemisphere temperature departures for 1700‐1992. Approximately 71% of the decadal variance in the last century can be modeled with these solar indices, although this analysis does not include anthropogenic or other variations which would affect the results. Over the entire three centuries, ∼50% of the variance is modeled. Both this analysis and previous similar analyses have correlations of model solar irradiances and measured Earth surface temperatures that are significant at better than the 95% confidence level. To understand our present climate variations, we must place the anthropogenic variations in the context of natural variability from solar, volcanic, oceanic, and other sources.
6. Lean, Judith, Juerg Beer, and Raymond Bradley. “Reconstruction of solar irradiance since 1610: Implications for climate change.” Geophysical Research Letters23 (1995): 3195-3198.  Solar total and ultraviolet (UV) irradiances are reconstructed annually from 1610 to the present.This epoch includes the Maunder Minimum of anomalously low solar activity (circa 1645–1715) and the subsequent increase to the high levels of the present Modern Maximum. In this reconstruction, the Schwabe (11‐year) irradiance cycle and a longer term variability component are determined separately, based on contemporary solar and stellar monitoring. The correlation of reconstructed solar irradiance and Northern Hemisphere (NH) surface temperature is 0.86 in the pre‐industrial period from 1610 to 1800, implying a predominant solar influence. Extending this correlation to the present suggests that solar forcing may have contributed about half of the observed 0.55°C surface warming since 1860 and one third of the warming since 1970.
7. Haigh, Joanna D. “The impact of solar variability on climate.” Science5264 (1996): 981-984.  A general circulation model that simulated changes in solar irradiance and stratospheric ozonewas used to investigate the response of the atmosphere to the 11-year solar activity cycle. At solar maximum, a warming of the summer stratosphere was found to strengthen easterly winds, which penetrated into the equatorial upper troposphere, causing poleward shifts in the positions of the subtropical westerly jets, broadening of the tropical Hadley circulations, and poleward shifts of the storm tracks. These effects are similar to, although generally smaller in magnitude than, those observed in nature. A simulation in which only solar irradiance was changed showed a much weaker response.
8. Svensmark, Henrik, and Eigil Friis-Christensen. “Variation of cosmic ray flux and global cloud coverage—a missing link in solar-climate relationships.” Journal of atmospheric and solar-terrestrial physics 59.11 (1997): 1225-1232.  In the search for a physical mechanism that could account for reported correlations between solar activity parameters and climate, we have investigated the global cloud cover observed by satellites. We find that the observed variation of 3–4% of the global cloud cover during the recent solar cycle is strongly correlated with the cosmic ray flux. This, in turn, is inversely correlated with the solar activity. The effect is larger at higher latitudes in agreement with the shielding effect of the Earth’s magnetic field on high-energy charged particles. The observed systematic variation in cloud cover will have a significant effect on the incoming solar radiation and may, therefore, provide a possible explanation of the tropospheric and stratospheric 10–12 year oscillations which have been reported. The above relation between cosmic ray flux and cloud cover should also be of importance in an explanation of the correlation between solar cycle length and global temperature, that has been found.
9. Beer, Jürg, Steven Tobias, and Nigel Weiss. “An active Sun throughout the Maunder minimum.” Solar Physics 181.1 (1998): 237-249.  Measurements of ¹⁰Be concentration in the Dye 3 ice core show that magnetic cycles persisted throughout the Maunder Minimum, although the Sun’s overall activity was drastically reduced and sunspots virtually disappeared. Thus the dates of maxima and minima can now be reliably estimated. Similar behaviour is shown by a nonlinear dynamo model, which predicts that, after a grand minimum, the Sun’s toroidal field may switch from being antisymmetric to being symmetric about the equator. The presence of cyclic activity during the Maunder Minimum limits estimates of the solar contribution to climatic change.
10. Svensmark, Henrik. “Influence of cosmic rays on Earth’s climate.” Physical Review Letters 81.22 (1998): 5027.  During the last solar cycle Earth’s cloud cover underwent a modulation more closely in phase with the galactic cosmic ray flux than with other solar activity parameters. Further it is found that Earth’s temperature follows more closely decade variations in galactic cosmic ray flux and solar cycle length, than other solar activity parameters. The main conclusion is that the average state of the heliosphere affects Earth’s climate.
11. Van Geel, Bas, et al. “The role of solar forcing upon climate change.” Quaternary Science Reviews 18.3 (1999): 331-338.  Evidence for millennial-scale climate changes during the last 60,000 years has been found in Greenland ice cores and North Atlantic ocean cores. Until now, the cause of these climate changes remained a matter of debate. We argue that variations in solar activity may have played a significant role in forcing these climate changes. We review the coincidence of variations in cosmogenic isotopes (¹⁴C and ¹⁰Be) with climate changes during the Holocene and the upper part of the last Glacial, and present two possible mechanisms (involving the role of solar UV variations and solar wind/cosmic rays) that may explain how small variations in solar activity are amplified to cause significant climate changes. Accepting the idea of solar forcing of Holocene and Glacial climatic shifts has major implications for our view of present and future climate. It implies that the climate system is far more sensitive to small variations in solar activity than generally believed.
12. Svensmark, Henrik. “Cosmic rays and Earth’s climate.” Cosmic Rays and Earth. Springer, Dordrecht, 2000. 175-185.  During the last solar cycle the Earth’s cloud cover underwent a modulation in phase with the cosmic ray flux. Assuming that there is a causal relationship between the two, it is expected and found that the Earth’s temperature follows more closely decade variations in cosmic ray flux than other solar activity parameters. If the relationship is real the state of the Heliosphere affects the Earth’s climate.
13. Marsh, Nigel D., and Henrik Svensmark. “Low cloud properties influenced by cosmic rays.” Physical Review Letters 85.23 (2000): 5004.  The influence of solar variability on climate is currently uncertain. Recent observations have indicated a possible mechanism via the influence of solar modulated cosmic rays on global cloud cover. Surprisingly the influence of solar variability is strongest in low clouds $\left(\le 3\mathrm{km}\right)$, which points to a microphysical mechanism involving aerosol formation that is enhanced by ionization due to cosmic rays. If confirmed it suggests that the average state of the heliosphere is important for climate on Earth.
14. Marsh, Nigel, and Henrik Svensmark. “Cosmic rays, clouds, and climate.” Space Science Reviews 94.1-2 (2000): 215-230.  A correlation between a global average of low cloud cover and the flux of cosmic rays incident in the atmosphere has been observed during the last solar cycle. The ionising potential of Earth bound cosmic rays are modulated by the state of the heliosphere, while clouds play an important role in the Earth’s radiation budget through trapping outgoing radiation and reflecting incoming radiation. If a physical link between these two features can be established, it would provide a mechanism linking solar activity and Earth’s climate. Recent satellite observations have further revealed a correlation between cosmic ray flux and low cloud top temperature. The temperature of a cloud depends on the radiation properties determined by its droplet distribution. Low clouds are warm (>273 K) and therefore consist of liquid water droplets. At typical atmospheric supersaturations (∼1%) a liquid cloud drop will only form in the presence of an aerosol, which acts as a condensation site. The droplet distribution of a cloud will then depend on the number of aerosols activated as cloud condensation nuclei (CCN) and the level of super saturation. Based on observational evidence it is argued that a mechanism to explain the cosmic ray-cloud link might be found through the role of atmospheric ionisation in aerosol production and/or growth. Observations of local aerosol increases in low cloud due to ship exhaust indicate that a small perturbation in atmospheric aerosol can have a major impact on low cloud radiative properties. Thus, a moderate influence on atmospheric aerosol distributions from cosmic ray ionisation would have a strong influence on the Earth’s radiation budget. Historical evidence over the past 1000 years indicates that changes in climate have occurred in accord with variability in cosmic ray intensities. Such changes are in agreement with the sign of cloud radiative forcing associated with cosmic ray variability as estimated from satellite observations.
15. Bard, Edouard, et al. “Solar irradiance during the last 1200 years based on cosmogenic nuclides.” Tellus B3 (2000): 985-992. Based on a quantitative study of the common fluctuations of ¹⁴C and ¹⁰Be production rates, we have derived a time series of the solar magnetic variability over the last 1200 years. This record is converted into irradiance variationsby linear scaling based on previous studies of sun‐like stars and of the sun’s behavior over the last few centuries. The new solar irradiance record exhibits low values during the well‐known solar minima centered at about 1900, 1810 (Dalton) and 1690 ad(Maunder). Further back in time, a rather long period between 1450 and 1750 ad is characterized by low irradiance values. A shorter period is centered at about 1200 ad, with irradiance slightly higher or similar to present day values. It is tempting to correlate these periods with the so‐called “little ice age” and “medieval warm period”, respectively. An accurate quantification of the climatic impact of this new irradiance record requires the use of coupled atmosphere–ocean general circulation models (GCMs). Nevertheless, our record is already compatible with a global cooling of about 0.5‐1°C during the “little ice age”, and with a general cooling trend during the past millenium followed by global warming during the 20th century (Mann et al., 1999).
16. Lean, Judith. “Evolution of the Sun’s spectral irradiance since the Maunder Minimum.” Geophysical Research Letters16 (2000): 2425-2428.  Because of the dependence of the Sun’s irradiance on solar activity, reductions from contemporary levels are expected during the seventeenth century Maunder Minimum. New reconstructions of spectral irradiance are developed since 1600with absolute scales traceable to space-based observations. The long-term variations track the envelope of group sunspot numbers and have amplitudes consistent with the range of Ca II brightness in Sun-like stars. Estimated increases since 1675 are 0.7%, 0.2% and 0.07% in broad ultraviolet, visible/near infrared and infrared spectral bands, with a total irradiance increase of 0.2%.
17. Lean, Judith. Online document [FULL TEXT PDF]Undated document circa 1995. The paper finds statistically significant temperature effects of the sunspot cycle in the pre-industrial era. In the post industrial era, the effect is undetectable because it has been overwhelmed by the anthropogenic CO2 greenhouse effect.
18. Crowley, Thomas J. “Causes of climate change over the past 1000 years.” Science5477 (2000): 270-277.  Recent reconstructions of Northern Hemisphere temperatures and climate forcing over the past 1000 yearsallow the warming of the 20th century to be placed within a historical context and various mechanisms of climate change to be tested. Comparisons of observations with simulations from an energy balance climate model indicate that as much as 41 to 64% of preanthropogenic (pre-1850) decadal-scale temperature variations was due to changes in solar irradiance and volcanism. Removal of the forced response from reconstructed temperature time series yields residuals that show similar variability to those of control runs of coupled models, thereby lending support to the models’ value as estimates of low-frequency variability in the climate system. Removal of all forcing except greenhouse gases from the ∼1000-year time series results in a residual with a very large late-20th-century warming that closely agrees with the response predicted from greenhouse gas forcing. The combination of a unique level of temperature increase in the late 20th century and improved constraints on the role of natural variability provides further evidence that the greenhouse effect has already established itself above the level of natural variability in the climate system. A 21st-century global warming projection far exceeds the natural variability of the past 1000 years and is greater than the best estimate of global temperature change for the last interglacial.
19. Allen, Myles R., et al. “Quantifying the uncertainty in forecasts of anthropogenic climate change.” Nature 407.6804 (2000): 617.  Forecasts of climate change are inevitably uncertain. It is therefore essential to quantify the risk of significant departures from the predicted response to a given emission scenario. Previous analyses of this risk have been based either on expert opinion¹, perturbation analysis of simplified climate models^2,3,4,5 or the comparison of predictions from general circulation models⁶. Recent observed changes that appear to be attributable to human influence^{7,8,9,10,11,12} provide a powerful constraint on the uncertainties in multi-decadal forecasts. Here we assess the range of warming rates over the coming 50 years that are consistent with the observed near-surface temperature record as well as with the overall patterns of response predicted by several general circulation models. We expect global mean temperatures in the decade 2036–46 to be 1–2.5 K warmer than in pre-industrial times under a ‘business as usual’ emission scenario. This range is relatively robust to errors in the models’ climate sensitivity, rate of oceanic heat uptake or global response to sulphate aerosols as long as these errors are persistent over time. Substantial changes in the current balance of greenhouse warming and sulphate aerosol cooling would, however, increase the uncertainty. Unlike 50-year warming rates, the final equilibrium warming after the atmospheric composition stabilizes remains very uncertain, despite the evidence provided by the emerging signal.
20. Shindell, Drew T., et al. “Solar forcing of regional climate change during the Maunder Minimum.” Science5549 (2001): 2149-2152.  We examine the climate response to solar irradiance changes between the late 17th-century Maunder Minimum and the late 18th century.Global average temperature changes are small (about 0.3° to 0.4°C) in both a climate model and empirical reconstructions. However, regional temperature changes are quite large. In the model, these occur primarily through a forced shift toward the low index state of the Arctic Oscillation/North Atlantic Oscillation as solar irradiance decreases. This leads to colder temperatures over the Northern Hemisphere continents, especially in winter (1° to 2°C), in agreement with historical records and proxy data for surface temperatures.
21. Luterbacher, Jürg, et al. “The late Maunder minimum (1675–1715)–a key period forstudying decadal scale climatic change in Europe.” Climatic Change 49.4 (2001): 441-462.  The Late Maunder Minimum (LMM, 1675–1715) denotes the climax of the `Little Ice Age’ in Europe with marked climate variability. Investigations into interannual and interdecadal differences of atmospheric circulation between the LMM and the period 1961–1990 have been performedand undertaken based upon sea level pressure (SLP) difference maps, empiricalorthogonal function (EOF) analysis, and objective classification techniques. Since the SLP during the LMM winter was significantly higher in northeastern Europe but below normal over the central and western Mediterranean, more frequent blocking situations were connected with cold air outbreaks towards central and eastern Europe. Springs were cold and characterized by a southward shift of the mid-latitude storm tracks. Summers in western, central Europe and northern Europe were wetter and slightly cooler than they are today due to a weakerAzores high and a more southerly position of the mean polar front axes. Autumns showed a significantly higher pressure over northern Europe and a lower pressure over continental Europe and the Mediterranean, an indication of an advanced change from summer to winter circulation. It is suggested that the pressure patterns during parts of the LMM might be attributed to the combination of external forcing factors (solar irradiance and volcanic activity) and internal oscillations and couplings in the North Atlantic.
22. Rind, David, et al. “The relative importance of solar and anthropogenic forcing of climate change between the Maunder Minimum and the present.” Journal of Climate 17.5 (2004): 906-929.  The climate during the Maunder Minimum is compared with current conditions in GCM simulations that include a full stratosphere and parameterized ozone response to solar spectral irradiance variability and trace gas changes. The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) Global Climate/Middle Atmosphere Model (GCMAM) coupled to a q-flux/mixed-layer model is used for the simulations, which begin in 1500 and extend to the present. Experiments were made to investigate the effect of total versus spectrally varying solar irradiance changes; spectrally varying solar irradiance changes on the stratospheric ozone/climate response with both preindustrial and present trace gases; and the impact on climate and stratospheric ozone of the preindustrial trace gases and aerosols by themselves. The results showed that 1) the Maunder Minimum cooling relative to today was primarily associated with reduced anthropogenic radiative forcing, although the solar reduction added 40% to the overall cooling. There is no obvious distinguishing surface climate pattern between the two forcings. 2) The global and tropical response was greater than 1°C, in a model with a sensitivity of 1.2°C (W m−2)−1. To reproduce recent low-end estimates would require a sensitivity one-fourth as large. 3) The global surface temperature change was similar when using the total and spectral irradiance prescriptions, although the tropical response was somewhat greater with the former, and the stratospheric response greater with the latter. 4) Most experiments produce a relative negative phase of the North Atlantic Oscillation/Arctic Oscillation (NAO/AO) during the Maunder Minimum, with both solar and anthropogenic forcing equally capable, associated with the tropical cooling and relative poleward Eliassen–Palm (EP) flux refraction. 5) A full stratosphere appeared to be necessary for the negative AO/NAO phase, as was the case with this model for global warming experiments, unless the cooling was very large, while the ozone response played a minor role and did not influence surface temperature significantly. 6) Stratospheric ozone was most affected by the difference between present-day and preindustrial atmospheric composition and chemistry, with increases in the upper and lower stratosphere during the Maunder Minimum. While the estimated UV reduction led to ozone decreases, this was generally less important than the anthropogenic effect except in the upper midstratosphere, as judged by two different ozone photochemistry schemes. 7) The effect of the reduced solar irradiance on stratospheric ozone and on climate was similar in Maunder Minimum and current atmospheric conditions.
23. Lean, Judith L. “Cycles and trends in solar irradiance and climate.” Wiley interdisciplinary reviews: climate change 1.1 (2010): 111-122.  Whether—the Sun’s variable energy outputs influence Earth’s climate has engaged scientific curiosity for more than a century. Early evidence accrued from correlations of assorted solar and climate indices, and from recognition that cycles near 11, 88 and 205 years are common in both the Sun and climate.1, 2 But until recently, an influence of solar variability on climate, whether through cycles or trends, was usually dismissed by climate models with (primarily) simple energy balance models indicated that responses to the decadal solar cycle would be so small as to be undetectable in observations.3 However, in the past decade modeling studies have found both resonant responses and positive feedbacks in the ocean‐atmosphere system that may amplify the response to solar irradiance variations.4, 5 Today, solar cycles and trends are recognized as important components of natural climate variability on decadal to centennial time scales. Understanding solar‐terrestrial linkages is requisite for the comprehensive understanding of Earth’s evolving environment. The attribution of present‐day climate change, interpretation of changes prior to the industrial epoch, and forecast of future decadal climate change necessitate quantitative understanding of how, when, where, and why natural variability, including by the Sun, may exceed, obscure or mitigate anthropogenic changes. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
24. Solheim, J. E. “The sunspot cycle length–modulated by planets.” Pattern Recogn. Phys 1 (2013): 159-164. The Schwabe frequency band of the sunspot record since 1700 has an average period of 11.06 yr and contains four major cycles, with periods of 9.97, 10.66, 11.01 and 11.83 yr. Analysis of the O–C residuals of the timing of solar cycle minima reveals that the solar cycle length is modulated by a secular period of about 190 yr and the Gleissberg period of about 86 yr. Based on a simple harmonic model with these periods, we predict that the solar cycle length will in average be longer during the 21st century. Cycle 24 may be about 12 yr long, while cycles 25 and 26 are estimated to be about 9 and 11 yr long. The following cycle is estimated to be 14 yr long. In all periods during the last 1000 yr, when the solar cycle length has increased due to the 190 yr cycle, a deep minimum of solar activity has occurred. This is expected to re-occur in the first part of this century. The coherent modulation of the solar cycle length over a period of 400 yr is a strong argument for an external tidal forcing by the planets Venus, Earth, Jupiter and Saturn, as expressed in a spin-orbit coupling model.
25. NASA 2001: From 1650 to 1710, temperatures across much of the Northern Hemisphere plunged when the Sun entered a quiet phase now called the Maunder Minimum. During this period, very few sunspots appeared on the surface of the Sun, and the overall brightness of the Sun decreased slightly. Already in the midst of a colder-than-average period called the Little Ice Age, Europe and North America went into a deep freeze: alpine glaciers extended over valley farmland; sea ice crept south from the Arctic; and the famous canals in the Netherlands froze regularly. The impact of the solar minimum was a temperature difference between 1680, a year at the center of the Maunder Minimum, and 1780, a year of normal solar activity, as calculated by a general circulation model. Deep blue across eastern and central North America and northern Eurasia illustrates where the drop in temperature was the greatest. Nearly all other land areas were also cooler in 1680, as indicated by the varying shades of blue. The few regions that appear to have been warmer in 1680 are Alaska and the eastern Pacific Ocean (left), the North Atlantic Ocean south of Greenland (left of center), and north of Iceland (top center).If energy from the Sun decreased only slightly, why did temperatures drop so severely in the Northern Hemisphere? Climate scientist Drew Shindell and colleagues at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies tackled that question by combining temperature records gleaned from tree rings, ice cores, corals, and the few measurements recorded in the historical record, with an advanced computer model of the Earth’s climate. The group first calculated the amount of energy coming from the Sun during the Maunder Minimum and entered the information into a general circulation model. The model is a mathematical representation of the way various Earth systems—ocean surface temperatures, different layers of the atmosphere, energy reflected and absorbed from land, and so forth—interact to produce the climate. When the model started with the decreased solar energy and returned temperatures that matched the paleoclimate record, Shindell and his colleagues knew that the model was showing how the Maunder Minimum could have caused the extreme drop in temperatures. The model showed that the drop in temperature was related to ozone in the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that is between 10 and 50 kilometers from the Earth’s surface. Ozone is created when high-energy ultraviolet light from the Sun interacts with oxygen. During the Maunder Minimum, the Sun emitted less strong ultraviolet light, and so less ozone formed. The decrease in ozone affected planetary waves, the giant wiggles in the jet stream that we are used to seeing on television weather reports. The change to the planetary waves kicked the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)—the balance between a permanent low-pressure system near Greenland and a permanent high-pressure system to its south—into a negative phase. When the NAO is negative, both pressure systems are relatively weak. Under these conditions, winter storms crossing the Atlantic generally head eastward toward Europe, which experiences a more severe winter. (When the NAO is positive, winter storms track farther north, making winters in Europe milder.) The model results, shown above, illustrate that the NAO was more negative on average during the Maunder Minimum, and Europe remained unusually cold. These results matched the paleoclimate record. By creating a model that could reproduce temperatures recorded in paleoclimate records, Shindell and colleagues reached a better understanding of how changes in the stratosphere influence weather patterns. With such an understanding, scientists are better poised to understand what factors could influence Earth’s climate in the future. To read more about how ancient temperature records are used to improve climate models, see Paleoclimatology: Understanding the Past to Predict the Future, the final installment of a series of articles about paleoclimatology on the Earth Observatory. Further Reading: Glaciers, Old Masters, and Galileo: The Puzzle of the Chilly 17th Century, by Drew Shindell at NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
    Note: Often times, due to the size, browsers have a difficult time opening and displaying images. If you experiece an error when clicking on an image link, please try directly downloading the image (using a right click, save as method) to view it locally. This image originally appeared on the Earth Observatory. Click here to view the full, original record. Contact Visible Earth
    National Climate Assessment
    Climate Resilience Toolkit
    Climate Data Initiative
    NASA – National Aeronautics and Space Administration
    Webmaster: Paul Przyborski
    NASA Official: Robert Levy
    Database Updated: July 23, 2019
    The Visible Earth is part of the EOS Project Science Office located at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

[HOME PAGE OF THIS SITE]

ABOUT THE UNABOMBER [WIKIPEDIA LINK]

THIS IS THE MANIFESTO THAT THE UNABOMBER WANTED PUBLISHED

1. The Industrial Revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race. They have greatly increased the life-expectancy of those of us who live in “advanced” countries, but they have destabilized society, have made life unfulfilling, have subjected human beings to indignities, have led to widespread psychological suffering (in the Third World to physical suffering as well) and have inflicted severe damage on the natural world. The continued development of technology will worsen the situation. It will certainly subject human beings to greater indignities and inflict greater damage on the natural world, it will probably lead to greater social disruption and psychological suffering, and it may lead to increased physical suffering even in “advanced” countries.
2. The industrial-technological system may survive or it may break down. If it survives, it MAY eventually achieve a low level of physical and psychological suffering, but only after passing through a long and very painful period of adjustment and only at the cost of permanently reducing human beings and many other living organisms to engineered products and mere cogs in the social machine. Furthermore, if the system survives, the consequences will be inevitable: There is no way of reforming or modifying the system so as to prevent it from depriving people of dignity and autonomy.
3. If the system breaks down the consequences will still be very painful. But the bigger the system grows the more disastrous the results of its breakdown will be, so if it is to break down it had best break down sooner rather than later.
4. We therefore advocate a revolution against the industrial system. This revolution may or may not make use of violence: it may be sudden or it may be a relatively gradual process spanning a few decades. We can’t predict any of that. But we do outline in a very general way the measures that those who hate the industrial system should take in order to prepare the way for a revolution against that form of society. This is not to be a POLITICAL revolution. Its object will be to overthrow not governments but the economic and technological basis of the present society.
5. In this article we give attention to only some of the negative developments that have grown out of the industrial-technological system. Other such developments we mention only briefly or ignore altogether. This does not mean that we regard these other developments as unimportant. For practical reasons we have to confine our discussion to areas that have received insufficient public attention or in which we have something new to say. For example, since there are well-developed environmental and wilderness movements, we have written very little about environmental degradation or the destruction of wild nature, even though we consider these to be highly important.

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MODERN LEFTISM

6. Almost everyone will agree that we live in a deeply troubled society. One of the most widespread manifestations of the craziness of our world is leftism, so a discussion of the psychology of leftism can serve as an introduction to the discussion of the problems of modern society in general.
7. But what is leftism? During the first half of the 20th century leftism could have been practically identified with socialism. Today the movement is fragmented and it is not clear who can properly be called a leftist. When we speak of leftists in this article we have in mind mainly socialists, collectivists, “politically correct” types, feminists, gay and disability activists, animal rights activists and the like. But not everyone who is associated with one of these movements is a leftist. What we are trying to get at in discussing leftism is not so much a movement or an ideology as a psychological type, or rather a collection of related types. Thus, what we mean by “leftism” will emerge more clearly in the course of our discussion of leftist psychology (Also, see paragraphs 227-230.)
8. Even so, our conception of leftism will remain a good deal less clear than we would wish, but there doesn’t seem to be any remedy for this. All we are trying to do is indicate in a rough and approximate way the two psychological tendencies that we believe are the main driving force of modern leftism. We by no means claim to be telling the WHOLE truth about leftist psychology. Also, our discussion is meant to apply to modern leftism only. We leave open the question of the extent to which our discussion could be applied to the leftists of the 19th and early 20th century.
9. The two psychological tendencies that underlie modern leftism we call “feelings of inferiority” and “oversocialization.” Feelings of inferiority are characteristic of modern leftism as a whole, while oversocialization is characteristic only of a certain segment of modern leftism; but this segment is highly influential.

FEELINGS OF INFERIORITY

10. By “feelings of inferiority” we mean not only inferiority feelings in the strictest sense but a whole spectrum of related traits: low self-esteem, feelings of powerlessness, depressive tendencies, defeatism, guilt, self-hatred, etc. We argue that modern leftists tend to have such feelings (possibly more or less repressed) and that these feelings are decisive in determining the direction of modern leftism.
11. When someone interprets as derogatory almost anything that is said about him (or about groups with whom he identifies) we conclude that he has inferiority feelings or low self-esteem. This tendency is pronounced among minority rights advocates, whether or not they belong to the minority groups whose rights they defend. They are hypersensitive about the words used to designate minorities. The terms “negro,” “oriental,” “handicapped” or “chick” for an African, an Asian, a disabled person or a woman originally had no derogatory connotation. “Broad” and “chick” were merely the feminine equivalents of “guy,” “dude” or “fellow.” The negative connotations have been attached to these terms by the activists themselves. Some animal rights advocates have gone so far as to reject the word “pet” and insist on its replacement by “animal companion.” Leftist anthropologists go to great lengths to avoid saying anything about primitive peoples that could conceivably be interpreted as negative. They want to replace the word “primitive” by “nonliterate.” They seem almost paranoid about anything that might suggest that any primitive culture is inferior to our own. (We do not mean to imply that primitive cultures ARE inferior to ours. We merely point out the hypersensitivity of leftish anthropologists.)
12. Those who are most sensitive about “politically incorrect” terminology are not the average black ghetto-dweller, Asian immigrant, abused woman or disabled person, but a minority of activists, many of whom do not even belong to any “oppressed” group but come from privileged strata of society. Political correctness has its stronghold among university professors, who have secure employment with comfortable salaries, and the majority of whom are heterosexual, white males from middle-class families.
13. Many leftists have an intense identification with the problems of groups that have an image of being weak (women), defeated (American Indians), repellent (homosexuals), or otherwise inferior. The leftists themselves feel that these groups are inferior. They would never admit it to themselves that they have such feelings, but it is precisely because they do see these groups as inferior that they identify with their problems. (We do not suggest that women, Indians, etc., ARE inferior; we are only making a point about leftist psychology).
14. Feminists are desperately anxious to prove that women are as strong as capable as men. Clearly they are nagged by a fear that women may NOT be as strong and as capable as men.
15. Leftists tend to hate anything that has an image of being strong, good and successful. They hate America, they hate Western civilization, they hate white males, they hate rationality. The reasons that leftists give for hating the West, etc. clearly do not correspond with their real motives. They SAY they hate the West because it is warlike, imperialistic, sexist, ethnocentric and so forth, but where these same faults appear in socialist countries or in primitive cultures, the leftist finds excuses for them, or at best he GRUDGINGLY admits that they exist; whereas he ENTHUSIASTICALLY points out (and often greatly exaggerates) these faults where they appear in Western civilization. Thus it is clear that these faults are not the leftist’s real motive for hating America and the West. He hates America and the West because they are strong and successful.
16. Words like “self-confidence,” “self-reliance,” “initiative”, “enterprise,” “optimism,” etc. play little role in the liberal and leftist vocabulary. The leftist is anti-individualistic, pro-collectivist. He wants society to solve everyone’s needs for them, take care of them. He is not the sort of person who has an inner sense of confidence in his own ability to solve his own problems and satisfy his own needs. The leftist is antagonistic to the concept of competition because, deep inside, he feels like a loser.
17. Art forms that appeal to modern leftist intellectuals tend to focus on sordidness, defeat and despair, or else they take an orgiastic tone, throwing off rational control as if there were no hope of accomplishing anything through rational calculation and all that was left was to immerse oneself in the sensations of the moment.
18. Modern leftist philosophers tend to dismiss reason, science, objective reality and to insist that everything is culturally relative. It is true that one can ask serious questions about the foundations of scientific knowledge and about how, if at all, the concept of objective reality can be defined. But it is obvious that modern leftist philosophers are not simply cool-headed logicians systematically analyzing the foundations of knowledge. They are deeply involved emotionally in their attack on truth and reality. They attack these concepts because of their own psychological needs. For one thing, their attack is an outlet for hostility, and, to the extent that it is successful, it satisfies the drive for power. More importantly, the leftist hates science and rationality because they classify certain beliefs as true (i.e., successful, superior) and other beliefs as false (i.e. failed, inferior). The leftist’s feelings of inferiority run so deep that he cannot tolerate any classification of some things as successful or superior and other things as failed or inferior. This also underlies the rejection by many leftists of the concept of mental illness and of the utility of IQ tests. Leftists are antagonistic to genetic explanations of human abilities or behavior because such explanations tend to make some persons appear superior or inferior to others. Leftists prefer to give society the credit or blame for an individual’s ability or lack of it. Thus if a person is “inferior” it is not his fault, but society’s, because he has not been brought up properly.
19. The leftist is not typically the kind of person whose feelings of inferiority make him a braggart, an egotist, a bully, a self-promoter, a ruthless competitor. This kind of person has not wholly lost faith in himself. He has a deficit in his sense of power and self-worth, but he can still conceive of himself as having the capacity to be strong, and his efforts to make himself strong produce his unpleasant behavior. [1] But the leftist is too far gone for that. His feelings of inferiority are so ingrained that he cannot conceive of himself as individually strong and valuable. Hence the collectivism of the leftist. He can feel strong only as a member of a large organization or a mass movement with which he identifies himself.
20. Notice the masochistic tendency of leftist tactics. Leftists protest by lying down in front of vehicles, they intentionally provoke police or racists to abuse them, etc. These tactics may often be effective, but many leftists use them not as a means to an end but because they PREFER masochistic tactics. Self-hatred is a leftist trait.
21. Leftists may claim that their activism is motivated by compassion or by moral principle, and moral principle does play a role for the leftist of the oversocialized type. But compassion and moral principle cannot be the main motives for leftist activism. Hostility is too prominent a component of leftist behavior; so is the drive for power. Moreover, much leftist behavior is not rationally calculated to be of benefit to the people whom the leftists claim to be trying to help. For example, if one believes that affirmative action is good for black people, does it make sense to demand affirmative action in hostile or dogmatic terms? Obviously it would be more productive to take a diplomatic and conciliatory approach that would make at least verbal and symbolic concessions to white people who think that affirmative action discriminates against them. But leftist activists do not take such an approach because it would not satisfy their emotional needs. Helping black people is not their real goal. Instead, race problems serve as an excuse for them to express their own hostility and frustrated need for power. In doing so they actually harm black people, because the activists’ hostile attitude toward the white majority tends to intensify race hatred.
22. If our society had no social problems at all, the leftists would have to INVENT problems in order to provide themselves with an excuse for making a fuss.
23. We emphasize that the foregoing does not pretend to be an accurate description of everyone who might be considered a leftist. It is only a rough indication of a general tendency of leftism.

OVERSOCIALIZATION

24. Psychologists use the term “socialization” to designate the process by which children are trained to think and act as society demands. A person is said to be well socialized if he believes in and obeys the moral code of his society and fits in well as a functioning part of that society. It may seem senseless to say that many leftists are over-socialized, since the leftist is perceived as a rebel. Nevertheless, the position can be defended. Many leftists are not such rebels as they seem.
25. The moral code of our society is so demanding that no one can think, feel and act in a completely moral way. For example, we are not supposed to hate anyone, yet almost everyone hates somebody at some time or other, whether he admits it to himself or not. Some people are so highly socialized that the attempt to think, feel and act morally imposes a severe burden on them. In order to avoid feelings of guilt, they continually have to deceive themselves about their own motives and find moral explanations for feelings and actions that in reality have a non-moral origin. We use the term “oversocialized” to describe such people. [2]
26. Oversocialization can lead to low self-esteem, a sense of powerlessness, defeatism, guilt, etc. One of the most important means by which our society socializes children is by making them feel ashamed of behavior or speech that is contrary to society’s expectations. If this is overdone, or if a particular child is especially susceptible to such feelings, he ends by feeling ashamed of HIMSELF. Moreover the thought and the behavior of the oversocialized person are more restricted by society’s expectations than are those of the lightly socialized person. The majority of people engage in a significant amount of naughty behavior. They lie, they commit petty thefts, they break traffic laws, they goof off at work, they hate someone, they say spiteful things or they use some underhanded trick to get ahead of the other guy. The oversocialized person cannot do these things, or if he does do them he generates in himself a sense of shame and self-hatred. The oversocialized person cannot even experience, without guilt, thoughts or feelings that are contrary to the accepted morality; he cannot think “unclean” thoughts. And socialization is not just a matter of morality; we are socialized to confirm to many norms of behavior that do not fall under the heading of morality. Thus the oversocialized person is kept on a psychological leash and spends his life running on rails that society has laid down for him. In many oversocialized people this results in a sense of constraint and powerlessness that can be a severe hardship. We suggest that oversocialization is among the more serious cruelties that human beings inflict on one another.
27. We argue that a very important and influential segment of the modern left is oversocialized and that their oversocialization is of great importance in determining the direction of modern leftism. Leftists of the oversocialized type tend to be intellectuals or members of the upper-middle class. Notice that university intellectuals (3) constitute the most highly socialized segment of our society and also the most left-wing segment.
28. The leftist of the oversocialized type tries to get off his psychological leash and assert his autonomy by rebelling. But usually he is not strong enough to rebel against the most basic values of society. Generally speaking, the goals of today’s leftists are NOT in conflict with the accepted morality. On the contrary, the left takes an accepted moral principle, adopts it as its own, and then accuses mainstream society of violating that principle. Examples: racial equality, equality of the sexes, helping poor people, peace as opposed to war, nonviolence generally, freedom of expression, kindness to animals. More fundamentally, the duty of the individual to serve society and the duty of society to take care of the individual. All these have been deeply rooted values of our society (or at least of its middle and upper classes (4) for a long time. These values are explicitly or implicitly expressed or presupposed in most of the material presented to us by the mainstream communications media and the educational system. Leftists, especially those of the oversocialized type, usually do not rebel against these principles but justify their hostility to society by claiming (with some degree of truth) that society is not living up to these principles.
29. Here is an illustration of the way in which the oversocialized leftist shows his real attachment to the conventional attitudes of our society while pretending to be in rebellion against it. Many leftists push for affirmative action, for moving black people into high-prestige jobs, for improved education in black schools and more money for such schools; the way of life of the black “underclass” they regard as a social disgrace. They want to integrate the black man into the system, make him a business executive, a lawyer, a scientist just like upper-middle-class white people. The leftists will reply that the last thing they want is to make the black man into a copy of the white man; instead, they want to preserve African American culture. But in what does this preservation of African American culture consist? It can hardly consist in anything more than eating black-style food, listening to black-style music, wearing black-style clothing and going to a black-style church or mosque. In other words, it can express itself only in superficial matters. In all ESSENTIAL respects more leftists of the oversocialized type want to make the black man conform to white, middle-class ideals. They want to make him study technical subjects, become an executive or a scientist, spend his life climbing the status ladder to prove that black people are as good as white. They want to make black fathers “responsible.” they want black gangs to become nonviolent, etc. But these are exactly the values of the industrial-technological system. The system couldn’t care less what kind of music a man listens to, what kind of clothes he wears or what religion he believes in as long as he studies in school, holds a respectable job, climbs the status ladder, is a “responsible” parent, is nonviolent and so forth. In effect, however much he may deny it, the oversocialized leftist wants to integrate the black man into the system and make him adopt its values.
30. We certainly do not claim that leftists, even of the oversocialized type, NEVER rebel against the fundamental values of our society. Clearly they sometimes do. Some oversocialized leftists have gone so far as to rebel against one of modern society’s most important principles by engaging in physical violence. By their own account, violence is for them a form of “liberation.” In other words, by committing violence they break through the psychological restraints that have been trained into them. Because they are oversocialized these restraints have been more confining for them than for others; hence their need to break free of them. But they usually justify their rebellion in terms of mainstream values. If they engage in violence they claim to be fighting against racism or the like.
31. We realize that many objections could be raised to the foregoing thumb-nail sketch of leftist psychology. The real situation is complex, and anything like a complete description of it would take several volumes even if the necessary data were available. We claim only to have indicated very roughly the two most important tendencies in the psychology of modern leftism.
32. The problems of the leftist are indicative of the problems of our society as a whole. Low self-esteem, depressive tendencies and defeatism are not restricted to the left. Though they are especially noticeable in the left, they are widespread in our society. And today’s society tries to socialize us to a greater extent than any previous society. We are even told by experts how to eat, how to exercise, how to make love, how to raise our kids and so forth.

THE POWER PROCESS

33. Human beings have a need (probably based in biology) for something that we will call the “power process.” This is closely related to the need for power (which is widely recognized) but is not quite the same thing. The power process has four elements. The three most clear-cut of these we call goal, effort and attainment of goal. (Everyone needs to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.) The fourth element is more difficult to define and may not be necessary for everyone. We call it autonomy and will discuss it later (paragraphs 42-44).
34. Consider the hypothetical case of a man who can have anything he wants just by wishing for it. Such a man has power, but he will develop serious psychological problems. At first he will have a lot of fun, but by and by he will become acutely bored and demoralized. Eventually he may become clinically depressed. History shows that leisured aristocracies tend to become decadent. This is not true of fighting aristocracies that have to struggle to maintain their power. But leisured, secure aristocracies that have no need to exert themselves usually become bored, hedonistic and demoralized, even though they have power. This shows that power is not enough. One must have goals toward which to exercise one’s power.
35. Everyone has goals; if nothing else, to obtain the physical necessities of life: food, water and whatever clothing and shelter are made necessary by the climate. But the leisured aristocrat obtains these things without effort. Hence his boredom and demoralization.
36. Non-attainment of important goals results in death if the goals are physical necessities, and in frustration if nonattainment of the goals is compatible with survival. Consistent failure to attain goals throughout life results in defeatism, low self-esteem or depression.
37. Thus, in order to avoid serious psychological problems, a human being needs goals whose attainment requires effort, and he must have a reasonable rate of success in attaining his goals.

SURROGATE ACTIVITIES

38. But not every leisured aristocrat becomes bored and demoralized. For example, the emperor Hirohito, instead of sinking into decadent hedonism, devoted himself to marine biology, a field in which he became distinguished. When people do not have to exert themselves to satisfy their physical needs they often set up artificial goals for themselves. In many cases they then pursue these goals with the same energy and emotional involvement that they otherwise would have put into the search for physical necessities. Thus the aristocrats of the Roman Empire had their literary pretentions; many European aristocrats a few centuries ago invested tremendous time and energy in hunting, though they certainly didn’t need the meat; other aristocracies have competed for status through elaborate displays of wealth; and a few aristocrats, like Hirohito, have turned to science.
39. We use the term “surrogate activity” to designate an activity that is directed toward an artificial goal that people set up for themselves merely in order to have some goal to work toward, or let us say, merely for the sake of the “fulfillment” that they get from pursuing the goal. Here is a rule of thumb for the identification of surrogate activities. Given a person who devotes much time and energy to the pursuit of goal X, ask yourself this: If he had to devote most of his time and energy to satisfying his biological needs, and if that effort required him to use his physical and mental facilities in a varied and interesting way, would he feel seriously deprived because he did not attain goal X? If the answer is no, then the person’s pursuit of a goal X is a surrogate activity. Hirohito’s studies in marine biology clearly constituted a surrogate activity, since it is pretty certain that if Hirohito had had to spend his time working at interesting non-scientific tasks in order to obtain the necessities of life, he would not have felt deprived because he didn’t know all about the anatomy and life-cycles of marine animals. On the other hand the pursuit of sex and love (for example) is not a surrogate activity, because most people, even if their existence were otherwise satisfactory, would feel deprived if they passed their lives without ever having a relationship with a member of the opposite sex. (But pursuit of an excessive amount of sex, more than one really needs, can be a surrogate activity.)
40. In modern industrial society only minimal effort is necessary to satisfy one’s physical needs. It is enough to go through a training program to acquire some petty technical skill, then come to work on time and exert very modest effort needed to hold a job. The only requirements are a moderate amount of intelligence, and most of all, simple OBEDIENCE. If one has those, society takes care of one from cradle to grave. (Yes, there is an underclass that cannot take physical necessities for granted, but we are speaking here of mainstream society.) Thus it is not surprising that modern society is full of surrogate activities. These include scientific work, athletic achievement, humanitarian work, artistic and literary creation, climbing the corporate ladder, acquisition of money and material goods far beyond the point at which they cease to give any additional physical satisfaction, and social activism when it addresses issues that are not important for the activist personally, as in the case of white activists who work for the rights of nonwhite minorities. These are not always pure surrogate activities, since for many people they may be motivated in part by needs other than the need to have some goal to pursue. Scientific work may be motivated in part by a drive for prestige, artistic creation by a need to express feelings, militant social activism by hostility. But for most people who pursue them, these activities are in large part surrogate activities. For example, the majority of scientists will probably agree that the “fulfillment” they get from their work is more important than the money and prestige they earn.
41. For many if not most people, surrogate activities are less satisfying than the pursuit of real goals ( that is, goals that people would want to attain even if their need for the power process were already fulfilled). One indication of this is the fact that, in many or most cases, people who are deeply involved in surrogate activities are never satisfied, never at rest. Thus the money-maker constantly strives for more and more wealth. The scientist no sooner solves one problem than he moves on to the next. The long-distance runner drives himself to run always farther and faster. Many people who pursue surrogate activities will say that they get far more fulfillment from these activities than they do from the “mundane” business of satisfying their biological needs, but that it is because in our society the effort needed to satisfy the biological needs has been reduced to triviality. More importantly, in our society people do not satisfy their biological needs AUTONOMOUSLY but by functioning as parts of an immense social machine. In contrast, people generally have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities. have a great deal of autonomy in pursuing their surrogate activities.

AUTONOMY

42. Autonomy as a part of the power process may not be necessary for every individual. But most people need a greater or lesser degree of autonomy in working toward their goals. Their efforts must be undertaken on their own initiative and must be under their own direction and control. Yet most people do not have to exert this initiative, direction and control as single individuals. It is usually enough to act as a member of a SMALL group. Thus if half a dozen people discuss a goal among themselves and make a successful joint effort to attain that goal, their need for the power process will be served. But if they work under rigid orders handed down from above that leave them no room for autonomous decision and initiative, then their need for the power process will not be served. The same is true when decisions are made on a collective bases if the group making the collective decision is so large that the role of each individual is insignificant [5]
43. It is true that some individuals seem to have little need for autonomy. Either their drive for power is weak or they satisfy it by identifying themselves with some powerful organization to which they belong. And then there are unthinking, animal types who seem to be satisfied with a purely physical sense of power(the good combat soldier, who gets his sense of power by developing fighting skills that he is quite content to use in blind obedience to his superiors).
44. But for most people it is through the power process-having a goal, making an AUTONOMOUS effort and attaining t the goal-that self-esteem, self-confidence and a sense of power are acquired. When one does not have adequate opportunity to go throughout the power process the consequences are (depending on the individual and on the way the power process is disrupted) boredom, demoralization, low self-esteem, inferiority feelings, defeatism, depression, anxiety, guilt, frustration, hostility, spouse or child abuse, insatiable hedonism, abnormal sexual behavior, sleep disorders, eating disorders, etc. [6]

SOURCES OF SOCIAL PROBLEMS

45. Any of the foregoing symptoms can occur in any society, but in modern industrial society they are present on a massive scale. We aren’t the first to mention that the world today seems to be going crazy. This sort of thing is not normal for human societies. There is good reason to believe that primitive man suffered from less stress and frustration and was better satisfied with his way of life than modern man is. It is true that not all was sweetness and light in primitive societies. Abuse of women and common among the Australian aborigines, transexuality was fairly common among some of the American Indian tribes. But is does appear that GENERALLY SPEAKING the kinds of problems that we have listed in the preceding paragraph were far less common among primitive peoples than they are in modern society.
46. We attribute the social and psychological problems of modern society to the fact that that society requires people to live under conditions radically different from those under which the human race evolved and to behave in ways that conflict with the patterns of behavior that the human race developed while living under the earlier conditions. It is clear from what we have already written that we consider lack of opportunity to properly experience the power process as the most important of the abnormal conditions to which modern society subjects people. But it is not the only one. Before dealing with disruption of the power process as a source of social problems we will discuss some of the other sources.
47. Among the abnormal conditions present in modern industrial society are excessive density of population, isolation of man from nature, excessive rapidity of social change and the break-down of natural small-scale communities such as the extended family, the village or the tribe.
48. It is well known that crowding increases stress and aggression. The degree of crowding that exists today and the isolation of man from nature are consequences of technological progress. All pre-industrial societies were predominantly rural. The industrial Revolution vastly increased the size of cities and the proportion of the population that lives in them, and modern agricultural technology has made it possible for the Earth to support a far denser population than it ever did before. (Also, technology exacerbates the effects of crowding because it puts increased disruptive powers in people’s hands. For example, a variety of noise-making devices: power mowers, radios, motorcycles, etc. If the use of these devices is unrestricted, people who want peace and quiet are frustrated by the noise. If their use is restricted, people who use the devices are frustrated by the regulations… But if these machines had never been invented there would have been no conflict and no frustration generated by them.)
49. For primitive societies the natural world (which usually changes only slowly) provided a stable framework and therefore a sense of security. In the modern world it is human society that dominates nature rather than the other way around, and modern society changes very rapidly owing to technological change. Thus there is no stable framework.
50. The conservatives are fools: They whine about the decay of traditional values, yet they enthusiastically support technological progress and economic growth. Apparently it never occurs to them that you can’t make rapid, drastic changes in the technology and the economy of a society with out causing rapid changes in all other aspects of the society as well, and that such rapid changes inevitably break down traditional values.
51. The breakdown of traditional values to some extent implies the breakdown of the bonds that hold together traditional small-scale social groups. The disintegration of small-scale social groups is also promoted by the fact that modern conditions often require or tempt individuals to move to new locations, separating themselves from their communities. Beyond that, a technological society HAS TO weaken family ties and local communities if it is to function efficiently. In modern society an individual’s loyalty must be first to the system and only secondarily to a small-scale community, because if the internal loyalties of small-scale small-scale communities were stronger than loyalty to the system, such communities would pursue their own advantage at the expense of the system.
52. Suppose that a public official or a corporation executive appoints his cousin, his friend or his co-religionist to a position rather than appointing the person best qualified for the job. He has permitted personal loyalty to supersede his loyalty to the system, and that is “nepotism” or “discrimination,” both of which are terrible sins in modern society. Would-be industrial societies that have done a poor job of subordinating personal or local loyalties to loyalty to the system are usually very inefficient. (Look at Latin America.) Thus an advanced industrial society can tolerate only those small-scale communities that are emasculated, tamed and made into tools of the system.
53. Crowding, rapid change and the breakdown of communities have been widely recognized as sources of social problems. but we do not believe they are enough to account for the extent of the problems that are seen today.
54. A few pre-industrial cities were very large and crowded, yet their inhabitants do not seem to have suffered from psychological problems to the same extent as modern man. In America today there still are uncrowded rural areas, and we find there the same problems as in urban areas, though the problems tend to be less acute in the rural areas. Thus crowding does not seem to be the decisive factor.
55. On the growing edge of the American frontier during the 19th century, the mobility of the population probably broke down extended families and small-scale social groups to at least the same extent as these are broken down today. In fact, many nuclear families lived by choice in such isolation, having no neighbors within several miles, that they belonged to no community at all, yet they do not seem to have developed problems as a result.
56. Furthermore, change in American frontier society was very rapid and deep. A man might be born and raised in a log cabin, outside the reach of law and order and fed largely on wild meat; and by the time he arrived at old age he might be working at a regular job and living in an ordered community with effective law enforcement. This was a deeper change that that which typically occurs in the life of a modern individual, yet it does not seem to have led to psychological problems. In fact, 19th century American society had an optimistic and self-confident tone, quite unlike that of today’s society.
57. The difference, we argue, is that modern man has the sense (largely justified) that change is IMPOSED on him, whereas the 19th century frontiersman had the sense (also largely justified) that he created change himself, by his own choice. Thus a pioneer settled on a piece of land of his own choosing and made it into a farm through his own effort. In those days an entire county might have only a couple of hundred inhabitants and was a far more isolated and autonomous entity than a modern county is. Hence the pioneer farmer participated as a member of a relatively small group in the creation of a new, ordered community. One may well question whether the creation of this community was an improvement, but at any rate it satisfied the pioneer’s need for the power process.
58. It would be possible to give other examples of societies in which there has been rapid change and/or lack of close community ties without he kind of massive behavioral aberration that is seen in today’s industrial society. We contend that the most important cause of social and psychological problems in modern society is the fact that people have insufficient opportunity to go through the power process in a normal way. We don’t mean to say that modern society is the only one in which the power process has been disrupted. Probably most if not all civilized societies have interfered with the power ‘ process to a greater or lesser extent. But in modern industrial society the problem has become particularly acute. Leftism, at least in its recent (mid-to-late -20th century) form, is in part a symptom of deprivation with respect to the power process.

DISRUPTION OF THE POWER PROCESS IN MODERN SOCIETY

59. We divide human drives into three groups: (1) those drives that can be satisfied with minimal effort; (2) those that can be satisfied but only at the cost of serious effort; (3) those that cannot be adequately satisfied no matter how much effort one makes. The power process is the process of satisfying the drives of the second group. The more drives there are in the third group, the more there is frustration, anger, eventually defeatism, depression, etc.
60. In modern industrial society natural human drives tend to be pushed into the first and third groups, and the second group tends to consist increasingly of artificially created drives.
61. In primitive societies, physical necessities generally fall into group 2: They can be obtained, but only at the cost of serious effort. But modern society tends to guaranty the physical necessities to everyone [9] in exchange for only minimal effort, hence physical needs are pushed into group 1. (There may be disagreement about whether the effort needed to hold a job is “minimal”; but usually, in lower- to middle-level jobs, whatever effort is required is merely that of obedience. You sit or stand where you are told to sit or stand and do what you are told to do in the way you are told to do it. Seldom do you have to exert yourself seriously, and in any case you have hardly any autonomy in work, so that the need for the power process is not well served.)
62. Social needs, such as sex, love and status, often remain in group 2 in modern society, depending on the situation of the individual. [10] But, except for people who have a particularly strong drive for status, the effort required to fulfill the social drives is insufficient to satisfy adequately the need for the power process.
63. So certain artificial needs have been created that fall into group 2, hence serve the need for the power process. Advertising and marketing techniques have been developed that make many people feel they need things that their grandparents never desired or even dreamed of. It requires serious effort to earn enough money to satisfy these artificial needs, hence they fall into group 2. (But see paragraphs 80-82.) Modern man must satisfy his need for the power process largely through pursuit of the artificial needs created by the advertising and marketing industry [11], and through surrogate activities.
64. It seems that for many people, maybe the majority, these artificial forms of the power process are insufficient. A theme that appears repeatedly in the writings of the social critics of the second half of the 20th century is the sense of purposelessness that afflicts many people in modern society. (This purposelessness is often called by other names such as “anomic” or “middle-class vacuity.”) We suggest that the so-called “identity crisis” is actually a search for a sense of purpose, often for commitment to a suitable surrogate activity. It may be that existentialism is in large part a response to the purposelessness of modern life. [12] Very widespread in modern society is the search for “fulfillment.” But we think that for the majority of people an activity whose main goal is fulfillment (that is, a surrogate activity) does not bring completely satisfactory fulfillment. In other words, it does not fully satisfy the need for the power process. (See paragraph 41.) That need can be fully satisfied only through activities that have some external goal, such as physical necessities, sex, love, status, revenge, etc.
65. Moreover, where goals are pursued through earning money, climbing the status ladder or functioning as part of the system in some other way, most people are not in a position to pursue their goals AUTONOMOUSLY. Most workers are someone else’s employee as, as we pointed out in paragraph 61, must spend their days doing what they are told to do in the way they are told to do it. Even most people who are in business for themselves have only limited autonomy. It is a chronic complaint of small-business persons and entrepreneurs that their hands are tied by excessive government regulation. Some of these regulations are doubtless unnecessary, but for the most part government regulations are essential and inevitable parts of our extremely complex society. A large portion of small business today operates on the franchise system. It was reported in the Wall Street Journal a few years ago that many of the franchise-granting companies require applicants for franchises to take a personality test that is designed to EXCLUDE those who have creativity and initiative, because such persons are not sufficiently docile to go along obediently with the franchise system. This excludes from small business many of the people who most need autonomy.
66. Today people live more by virtue of what the system does FOR them or TO them than by virtue of what they do for themselves. And what they do for themselves is done more and more along channels laid down by the system. Opportunities tend to be those that the system provides, the opportunities must be exploited in accord with the rules and regulations [13], and techniques prescribed by experts must be followed if there is to be a chance of success.
67. Thus the power process is disrupted in our society through a deficiency of real goals and a deficiency of autonomy in pursuit of goals. But it is also disrupted because of those human drives that fall into group 3: the drives that one cannot adequately satisfy no matter how much effort one makes. One of these drives is the need for security. Our lives depend on decisions made by other people; we have no control over these decisions and usually we do not even know the people who make them. (“We live in a world in which relatively few people – maybe 500 or 1,00 – make the important decisions” – Philip B. Heymann of Harvard Law School, quoted by Anthony Lewis, New York Times, April 21, 1995.) Our lives depend on whether safety standards at a nuclear power plant are properly maintained; on how much pesticide is allowed to get into our food or how much pollution into our air; on how skillful (or incompetent) our doctor is; whether we lose or get a job may depend on decisions made by government economists or corporation executives; and so forth. Most individuals are not in a position to secure themselves against these threats to more [than] a very limited extent. The individual’s search for security is therefore frustrated, which leads to a sense of powerlessness.
68. It may be objected that primitive man is physically less secure than modern man, as is shown by his shorter life expectancy; hence modern man suffers from less, not more than the amount of insecurity that is normal for human beings. but psychological security does not closely correspond with physical security. What makes us FEEL secure is not so much objective security as a sense of confidence in our ability to take care of ourselves. Primitive man, threatened by a fierce animal or by hunger, can fight in self-defense or travel in search of food. He has no certainty of success in these efforts, but he is by no means helpless against the things that threaten him. The modern individual on the other hand is threatened by many things against which he is helpless; nuclear accidents, carcinogens in food, environmental pollution, war, increasing taxes, invasion of his privacy by large organizations, nation-wide social or economic phenomena that may disrupt his way of life.
69. It is true that primitive man is powerless against some of the things that threaten him; disease for example. But he can accept the risk of disease stoically. It is part of the nature of things, it is no one’s fault, unless is the fault of some imaginary, impersonal demon. But threats to the modern individual tend to be MAN-MADE. They are not the results of chance but are IMPOSED on him by other persons whose decisions he, as an individual, is unable to influence. Consequently he feels frustrated, humiliated and angry.
70. Thus primitive man for the most part has his security in his own hands (either as an individual or as a member of a SMALL group) whereas the security of modern man is in the hands of persons or organizations that are too remote or too large for him to be able personally to influence them. So modern man’s drive for security tends to fall into groups 1 and 3; in some areas (food, shelter, etc.) his security is assured at the cost of only trivial effort, whereas in other areas he CANNOT attain security. (The foregoing greatly simplifies the real situation, but it does indicate in a rough, general way how the condition of modern man differs from that of primitive man.)
71. People have many transitory drives or impulses that are necessary frustrated in modern life, hence fall into group 3. One may become angry, but modern society cannot permit fighting. In many situations it does not even permit verbal aggression. When going somewhere one may be in a hurry, or one may be in a mood to travel slowly, but one generally has no choice but to move with the flow of traffic and obey the traffic signals. One may want to do one’s work in a different way, but usually one can work only according to the rules laid down by one’s employer. In many other ways as well, modern man is strapped down by a network of rules and regulations (explicit or implicit) that frustrate many of his impulses and thus interfere with the power process. Most of these regulations cannot be disposed with, because the are necessary for the functioning of industrial society.
72. Modern society is in certain respects extremely permissive. In matters that are irrelevant to the functioning of the system we can generally do what we please. We can believe in any religion we like (as long as it does not encourage behavior that is dangerous to the system). We can go to bed with anyone we like (as long as we practice “safe sex”). We can do anything we like as long as it is UNIMPORTANT. But in all IMPORTANT matters the system tends increasingly to regulate our behavior.
73. Behavior is regulated not only through explicit rules and not only by the government. Control is often exercised through indirect coercion or through psychological pressure or manipulation, and by organizations other than the government, or by the system as a whole. Most large organizations use some form of propaganda [14] to manipulate public attitudes or behavior. Propaganda is not limited to “commercials” and advertisements, and sometimes it is not even consciously intended as propaganda by the people who make it. For instance, the content of entertainment programming is a powerful form of propaganda. An example of indirect coercion: There is no law that says we have to go to work every day and follow our employer’s orders. Legally there is nothing to prevent us from going to live in the wild like primitive people or from going into business for ourselves. But in practice there is very little wild country left, and there is room in the economy for only a limited number of small business owners. Hence most of us can survive only as someone else’s employee.
74. We suggest that modern man’s obsession with longevity, and with maintaining physical vigor and sexual attractiveness to an advanced age, is a symptom of un-fulfillment resulting from deprivation with respect to the power process. The “mid-life crisis” also is such a symptom. So is the lack of interest in having children that is fairly common in modern society but almost unheard-of in primitive societies.
75. In primitive societies life is a succession of stages. The needs and purposes of one stage having been fulfilled, there is no particular reluctance about passing on to the next stage. A young man goes through the power process by becoming a hunter, hunting not for sport or for fulfillment but to get meat that is necessary for food. (In young women the process is more complex, with greater emphasis on social power; we won’t discuss that here.) This phase having been successfully passed through, the young man has no reluctance about settling down to the responsibilities of raising a family. (In contrast, some modern people indefinitely postpone having children because they are too busy seeking some kind of “fulfillment.” We suggest that the fulfillment they need is adequate experience of the power process — with real goals instead of the artificial goals of surrogate activities.) Again, having successfully raised his children, going through the power process by providing them with the physical necessities, the primitive man feels that his work is done and he is prepared to accept old age (if he survives that long) and death. Many modern people, on the other hand, are disturbed by the prospect of death, as is shown by the amount of effort they expend trying to maintain their physical condition, appearance and health. We argue that this is due to unfulfillment resulting from the fact that they have never put their physical powers to any use, have never gone through the power process using their bodies in a serious way. It is not the primitive man, who has used his body daily for practical purposes, who fears the deterioration of age, but the modern man, who has never had a practical use for his body beyond walking from his car to his house. It is the man whose need for the power process has been satisfied during his life who is best prepared to accept the end of that life.
76. In response to the arguments of this section someone will say, “Society must find a way to give people the opportunity to go through the power process.” For such people the value of the opportunity is destroyed by the very fact that society gives it to them. What they need is to find or make their own opportunities. As long as the system GIVES them their opportunities it still has them on a leash. To attain autonomy they must get off that leash.

[HOME PAGE OF THIS SITE]

ABSTRACT: A literature review shows that climate appears to exhibit properties of non-linear dynamics and deterministic chaos over centennial to millennial time scales. Glaciation is not a linear and well behaved period of cooling and ice accumulation and deglaciation is not a linear and well behaved period of warming and ice dissipation. Rather, both glaciation and deglaciation are chaotic events consisting of both processes differentiated only by a slight advantage to ice accumulation in glaciation and a slight advantage to ice dissipation in deglaciation and interglacials. It is in this context that all Holocene temperature cycles must be viewed. If climate science can explain these Holocene temperature cycles as deterministic cause and effect phenomena, they should explain all of them and not just pick one of them to explain in that way because that kind of empirical research is subject to data selection bias, confirmation bias, and circular reasoning. The climate science of Anthropogenic Global Warming and Climate Change that has selected only the post LIA warming cycle to explain as a cause and effect phenomenon can be rejected solely on that basis. POSTSCRIPT: In a related post, a Keeling and Whorf paper makes the same argument and the authors propose a theory of the temperature cycles of the Holocene in terms of tidal cycle resonance dynamics [LINK] . 

FIGURE 1: THE YOUNGER DRYAS EVENT IN THE HOLOCENE

FIGURE 2: THE BRONZE AGE WARMING EVENT IN THE HOLOCENE

FIGURE 3: THE LAST GLACIATION: EEMIAN TO HOLOCENE

FIGURE 4: FRAMES 11 KYBP APART FROM 120 TO 66 KYBP

        120, 109, 99, 88, 77, 66 KYBP

FIGURE 5: FRAMES 11 KYBP APART FROM 56 TO 0 KYBP

56, 45, 34, 23, 13, 0 KYBP

[HOME PAGE]

RELATED POST ON LATE BRONZE AGE COLLAPSE [LINK] 

HOLOCENE CLIMATE HISTORY FROM 15000YBP

1. Figure 3 above is a video that shows a section of the Northern Hemisphere that contains the location where the Laurentide ice sheet forms during glaciation cycles.  It is an animation of the most recent glaciation sequence from the previous interglacial (the Eemian), through the Last Glaciation Period (LGP), to the present interglacial (the Holocene). It begins in the Eemian interglacial ≈120,000 years before the present (120KYBP) relatively free of ice except for Greenland and moves forward at 1,791 years per second to the present; thus beginning and ending in almost identical iceless states except for Greenland. In between these iceless interglacial states is seen the growth and decay of the last glaciation. These changes are violent, non-linear, and chaotic. As seen in the video, both the growth in glaciation from 120KYBP to about 56KYBP and its decay back to interglacial conditions contain multiple cycles of growth and decay at centennial and millennial time scales. The timing of these changes may be difficult to see in the video because of its extremely fast progression at ≈2000 years per second. It is made somewhat clearer in Figures 4&5 that appear immediately below Figure 3.
2. Figure 4 and Figure 5 show the glaciation condition in still frames that are approximately ≈11,000 years apart. Figure 4 shows conditions in the first half of the time span at 120, 109, 99, 88, 77, and 66 KYBP. Here we see a growth of glaciation from the Eemian interglacial condition that progresses in cycles of growth and retreat in glaciation. The reason ice accumulates during glaciation is that growth events overcome retreat events. In this chaotic way, glaciation reaches a maximum The Last Glacial Maximum (LGM) in the first frame of Figure 5.
3. Figure 5 shows conditions for the second time span at 56, 45, 34, 23, 13, 0 KYBP. These frames show glacial retreat after its maximum extent at 56KYBP. As in the growth phase, glacial retreat also progresses in cycles of growth and retreat in a violent and chaotic way, but in this phase of the glaciation cycle retreat events overcome growth events and glaciation ice sheets gradually dissipate until an interglacial period such as the the Holocene interglacial is fully established in the last frame of Figure 5 at 0KYBP. Thus approximately half of the Last Glacial Period (LGP) shows glacial growth and the other half shows glacial retreat. It is important to note that although the chaotic volatility in the glaciation cycle appears rapid and violent in the video, these changes occur at millennial and longer time scales and the video moves forward at ≈2000 years per second.
4. In the Quaternary Ice Age in which we live, the earth is mostly in a glaciation state exhibiting glacial growth in the earlier portion and glacial retreat in the latter portion. In between glaciation periods are brief interglacials lasting approximately 10% of the time span of glaciation periods. Glaciations last about ≈100,000 years give or take a few thousand and interglacials about ≈10,000  years give or take a few thousand. We are currently in the Holocene interglacial. The previous interglacial is called the Eemian.
5. The Eemian interglacial is described in a related post [LINK] where we see that the chaotic back and forth cyclical progress of the glaciation phase is also seen in the interglacial phase. Thus, in the Eemian interglacial we find a similarly violent state of cyclical climate oscillating between cold and hot periods as well as between rising and falling sea levels. Thus the cyclical and violent changes of warming and and cooling seen in glaciation periods are also found in interglacials. In the Eemian, and in interglacials in general, these  changes within  interglacials occur at multi-decadal, centennial and millennial time scales. The bibliography presented below shows that similar, though less intense, cycles of cooling and warming are also found in the Holocene from its violent inception in the Younger Dryas event  to the present.
6. The Younger Dryas Event (YDE) is described in a related post [LINK] .The paleo data collected by Willi Dansgaard and others show that as soon as the Last Glacial Period had apparently ended, a series of brief but violent cycles of glaciation and deglaciation conditions at very short time scales intervened. Figure 1 (reproduced below) is a graphical depiction of the violent and chaotic temperature changes seen in the YDE. Here red lines indicate warming, blue lines indicate cooling, and black lines are neutral. At ≈14,450YBP, we see a steep vertical red line as that appears to be an initial stage of the end of the LGP and the onset of the Holocene. Instead, at≈14,500YBP, rapid cooling and glaciation returned and drove temperatures in Greenland down by 15C at ≈12,000YBP. Shortly thereafter, ≈11,700YBP, a strong warming trend set in and persisted with a steady warming of ≈17C that rescued the Holocene from the YDE but two more glacial interruptions were still to come.
7. The first of these two cooling events is called the 8.2K cooling (shown in blue) because it ends 8200YBP. The Holocene interglacial recovered from the 8.2K mini glacial event and warmed to the so called “Holocene Climate Optimum” (HCO) ≈7000YBP. The HCO, described in a related post [LINK] , is credited with the Neolithic Revolution that is thought to have created human civilization. It brought hunter gatherer humans out of the forests and caves and into a settled agricultural economy with farms and permanent homes eventually leading to kingdoms, nations, learning, and innovation described in a related post on the Bronze Age [LINK] . The black curve that runs from ≈7000YBP to the present is the temperature history of the Holocene since the warming began in earnest in the HCO.
8. Four other Holocene temperature events since, in addition to the HCO, are considered important in the climate history of the Holocene interglacial. These are the Bronze Age warm period ≈3000YBP, (also called the Minoan Warm Period (BAWP), the Roman warm period (RWP)≈2000YBP, the Medieval warm period (MWP) ≈1100YBP, and the Little Ice Age (LIA) ≈500YBP-100YBP (the last blue cooling line in the chart). The current warm period, described as Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) caused by the Industrial Economy although some research implies that it may be a natural recovery from the LIA as described in a related post [LINK] . Posts on the MWP [LINK] and the LIA [LINK] are also relevant in this context.
9. Thus we find that both glaciation and interglacial periods exhibit millennial scale chaotic behavior. In the bibliography below Gerard Bond, in “A pervasive millennial-scale cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and glacial climates.” science278.5341 (1997), writes that “pacings of the Holocene events and of and those in the last glaciation are statistically the same. Together, they make up a series of climate shifts with a period close to 1470 ± 500 years“. That is, although glaciation and interglacials are entirely different states of the earth’s surface climate system, both are subject to the same underlying chaotic volatility at the same time scale.
10. A shorter time scale is implied in Wanner, Heinz “Structure and origin of Holocene cold events.” Quaternary Science Reviews 30.21-22 (2011). The paper describes the Holocene as an interglacial with an overall warming trend that is repeatedly interrupted by cold events at centennial and shorter time scales. He identifies the six cold events as (8200, 6300, 4700, 2700, 1550 and 550YBP). Mayeweski 2004 also identifies six cold events but dates them as 9000″8000, 6000-5000YBP, 4200-3800YBP, 3500-2500YBP, 1200-1000YBP, and 600-150YBP.
11. However, as noted by many authors in the bibliography below, the Holocene is also marked by episodes of exceptional warmth. Other than the initial HCO, the most notable of these events are (1) the Bronze Age Warming (BAW) also known as the Minoan Warm Period ≈3000YBP, The Roman Warm Period (RWP) ≈2000YBP, the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) ≈1000YBP, and the current warm period thought to be artificial and a creation of the industrial economy. The millennial time scale is evident in these events that include the current warm period.
12. SUMMARY & CONCLUSION: A literature review shows that climate appears to exhibit properties of non-linear dynamics and deterministic chaos over centennial to millennial time scales. Glaciation is not a linear and well behaved period of cooling and ice accumulation and deglaciation is not a linear and well behaved period of warming and ice dissipation. Rather, both glaciation and deglaciation are chaotic events consisting of both processes differentiated only by a slight advantage to ice accumulation in glaciation and a slight advantage to ice dissipation in deglaciation and interglacials. It is in this context that all Holocene temperature cycles must be viewed. If climate science can explain these Holocene temperature cycles as deterministic cause and effect phenomena, they should explain all of them and not just pick one of them to explain in that way because that kind of empirical research is subject to data selection bias, confirmation bias, and circular reasoning. The climate science of Anthropogenic Global Warming and Climate Change that has selected only the post LIA warming cycle to explain as a cause and effect phenomenon can be rejected solely on that basis. POSTSCRIPT: In a related post, a Keeling and Whorf paper makes the same argument and the authors propose a theory of the temperature cycles of the Holocene in terms of tidal cycle resonance dynamics [LINK] . 

[HOME PAGE]

HOLOCENE BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Denton, George H., and Wibjörn Karlén. “Holocene climatic variations—their pattern and possible cause.” Quaternary Research 3.2 (1973): 155-205. In the northeastern St. Elias Mountains in southern Yukon Territory and Alaska, C14-dated fluctuations of 14 glacier termini show two major intervals of Holocene glacier expansion, the older dating from 3300-2400 calendar yr BP and the younger corresponding to the Little Ice Age of the last several centuries. Both were about equivalent in magnitude. In addition, a less-extensive and short-lived advance occurred about 1250-1050 calendar yr BP (A.D. 700–900). Conversely, glacier recession, commonly accompanied by rise in altitude of spruce tree line, occurred 5975–6175, 4030-3300, 2400-1250, and 1050-460 calendar yr BP, and from A.D. 1920 to the present. Examination of worldwide Holocene glacier fluctuations reinforces this scheme and points to a third major interval of glacier advances about 5800-4900 calendar yrs BP; this interval generally was less intense than the two younger major intervals. Finally, detailed mapping and dating of Holocene moraines fronting 40 glaciers in the Kebnekaise and Sarek Mountains in Swedish Lapland reveals again that the Holocene was punctuated by repeated intervals of glacier expansion that correspond to those found in the St. Elias Mountains and elsewhere. The two youngest intervals, which occurred during the Little Ice Age and again about 2300–3000 calendar yrs BP, were approximately equal in intensity. Advances of the two older intervals, which occurred approximately 5000 and 8000 calendar yr BP, were generally less extensive. Minor glacier fluctuations were superimposed on all four broad expansion intervals; glacial expansions of the Little Ice Age culminated about A.D. 1500–1640, 1710, 1780, 1850, 1890, and 1916. In the mountains of Swedish Lapland, Holocene mean summer temperature rarely, if ever, was lower than 1°C below the 1931–1960 summer mean. Summer temperatures varied by less than 3.5°C over the last two broad intervals of Holocene glacial expansion and contraction. Viewed as a whole, therefore, the Holocene experienced alternating intervals of glacier expansion and contraction that probably were superimposed on the broad climatic trends recognized in pollen profiles and deep-sea cores. Expansion intervals lasted up to 900 yr and contraction intervals up to 1750 yr. Dates of glacial maxima indicate that the major Holocene intervals of expansion peaked at about 200–330, 2800, and 5300 calendar yr BP, suggesting a recurrence of major glacier activity about each 2500 yr. If projected further into the past, this Holocene pattern predicts that alternating glacier expansion-contraction intervals should have been superimposed on the Late-Wisconsin glaciation, with glacier readvances peaking about 7800, 10,300, 12,800, and 15,300 calendar yr BP. These major readvances should have been separated by intervals of general recession, some of which might have been punctuated by short-lived advances. Furthermore, the time scales of Holocene events and their Late-Wisconsin analogues should be comparable. Considering possible errors in C14 dating, this extended Holocene scheme agrees reasonably well with the chronology and magnitude of such Late-Wisconsin events as the Cochrane-Cockburn readvance (8000–8200 C14 yr BP), the Pre-Boreal interstadial, the Fennoscandian readvances during the Younger Dryas stadial (10,850-10,050 varve yr BP), the Alleröd interstadial (11,800-10,900 C14 yr BP), the Port Huron readvance (12,700–13,000 C14 yr BP), the Cary/Port Huron interstadial (centered about 13,300 C14 yr BP), and the Cary stadial (14,000–15,000 C14 yr BP). Moreover, comparison of presumed analogues such as the Little Ice Age and the Younger Dryas, or the Alleröd and the Roman Empire-Middle Ages warm interval, show marked similarities. These results suggest that a recurring pattern of minor climatic variations, with a dominant overprint of cold intervals peaking about each 2500 yr, was superimposed on long-term Holocene and Late-Wisconsin climatic trends. Should this pattern continue to repeat itself, the Little Ice Age will be succeeded within the next few centuries by a long interval of milder climates similar to those of the Roman Empire and Middle Ages. Short-term atmospheric C14 variations measured from tree rings correlate closely with Holocene glacier and tree-line fluctuations during the last 7000 yr. Such a correspondence, firstly, suggests that the record of short-term C14 variations may be an empirical indicator of paleoclimates and, secondly, points to a possible cause of Holocene climatic variations. The most prominent explanation of short-term C14 variations involves modulation of the galactic cosmic-ray flux by varying solar corpuscular activity. If this explanation proves valid and if the solar constant can be shown to vary with corpuscular output, it would suggest that Holocene glacier and climatic fluctuations, because of their close correlation with short-term C14 variations, were caused by varying solar activity. By extension, this would imply a similar cause for Late-Wisconsin climatic fluctuations such as the Alleröd and Younger Dryas.
2. Hammer, Claus U., Henrik B. Clausen, and Willi Dansgaard. “Greenland ice sheet evidence of post-glacial volcanism and its climatic impact.” Nature 288.5788 (1980): 230. Acidity profiles along well dated Greenland ice cores reveal large volcanic eruptions in the Northern Hemisphere during the past 10,000 yr. Comparison with a temperature index shows that clustered eruptions have a considerable cooling effect on climate, which further complicates climatic predictions.
3. O’Brien, S. R., (Mayewski). “Complexity of Holocene climate as reconstructed from a Greenland ice core.” Science 270.5244 (1995): 1962-1964.  Glaciochemical time series developed from Summit, Greenland, indicate that the chemical composition of the atmosphere was dynamic during the Holocene epoch. Concentrations of sea salt and terrestrial dusts increased in Summit snow during the periods 0 to 600, 2400 to 3100, 5000 to 6100, 7800 to 8800, and more than 11,300 years ago. The most recent increase, and also the most abrupt, coincides with the Little Ice Age. These changes imply that either the north polar vortex expanded or the meridional air flow intensified during these periods, and that temperatures in the mid to high northern latitudes were potentially the coldest since the Younger Dryas event.
4. Angelakis, Andreas N., and Stylianos V. Spyridakis. “The status of water resources in Minoan times: A preliminary study.” Diachronic Climatic Impacts on Water Resources. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1996. 161-191.A well-known passage in Homer’s Odyssey, probably based on an ancient ritual myth, tells the story of Demeter, the Greek corn-goddess and Iasion, the son of Zeus by Electra, daughter of Atlas. The latter was the guardian of the pillars of heaven (Odyssey, 1.53), the Titan who holds the sky up (Hesiod, Theogony, 517) and is, thereby, identified with water and rainfall. [FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD .
5. Alley, Richard B., (Mayewski)  “Holocene climatic instability: A prominent, widespread event 8200 yr ago.” Geology 25.6 (1997): 483-486.  The most prominent Holocene climatic event in Greenland ice-core proxies, with approximately half the amplitude of the Younger Dryas, occurred ∼8000 to 8400 yr ago. This Holocene event affected regions well beyond the North Atlantic basin, as shown by synchronous increases in windblown chemical indicators together with a significant decrease in methane. Widespread proxy records from the tropics to the north polar regions show a short-lived cool, dry, or windy event of similar age. The spatial pattern of terrestrial and marine changes is similar to that of the Younger Dryas event, suggesting a role for North Atlantic thermohaline circulation. Possible forcings identified thus far for this Holocene event are small, consistent with recent model results indicating high sensitivity and strong linkages in the climatic system.
6. Bond, Gerard, et al. “A pervasive millennial-scale cycle in North Atlantic Holocene and glacial climates.” science278.5341 (1997): 1257-1266.  Evidence from North Atlantic deep sea cores reveals that abrupt shifts punctuated what is conventionally thought to have been a relatively stable Holocene climate. During each of these episodes, cool, ice-bearing waters from north of Iceland were advected as far south as the latitude of Britain. At about the same times, the atmospheric circulation above Greenland changed abruptly. Pacings of the Holocene events and of abrupt climate shifts during the last glaciation are statistically the same; together, they make up a series of climate shifts with a cyclicity close to 1470 ± 500 years. The Holocene events, therefore, appear to be the most recent manifestation of a pervasive millennial-scale climate cycle operating independently of the glacial-interglacial climate state. Amplification of the cycle during the last glaciation may have been linked to the North Atlantic’s thermohaline circulation.
7. Roberts, Neil, et al. “The age and causes of Mid-Late Holocene environmental change in southwest Turkey.” Third Millennium BC climate change and old world collapse. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 1997. 409-429.  Proxy records such as lake sediment sequences provide important data on abrupt environmental changes in the past, but establishing their specific causes from the palaeoenvironmental record can be problematic. Pollen diagrams from southwest Turkey show a mid-late Holocene pollen assemblage zone, designated as the Beyşehir Occupation phase, the onset of which has been 14C dated to ca. 3000 BP (ca. 1250 BC). A second millennium BC date for the start of the Beyşehir Occupation phase can now be confirmed as a result of the discovery of volcanic tephra from the Minoan eruption of Santorini (Thera) in lake sediment cores from the region. Palaeoecological analyses on sediment cores from Gölhisar gölü, a shallow montane lake, indicate that tephra deposition was followed by a sustained response in the aquatic ecosystem, in the form of increased algal productivity. The onset of pollen changes marking the beginning of the Beyşehir Occupation phase was not, on the other hand, precisely coincident with the tephra layer, but rather occurred at least a century later at this site. Despite the paucity of archaeological evidence for Late Bronze Age settlement in the Oro-Mediterranean region of southwest Turkey, it would appear that the second millennium BC saw the start of a period of major human impact on the landscape which continued until the late first millennium AD. The Santorini ash represents an important time-synchronous, stratigraphic marker horizon, but does not appear to have been the immediate cause of the onset of the Beyş ehir Occupation phase.
8. Bond, Gerard, et al. “Persistent solar influence on North Atlantic climate during the Holocene.” science 294.5549 (2001): 2130-2136.  Surface winds and surface ocean hydrography in the subpolar North Atlantic appear to have been influenced by variations in solar output through the entire Holocene. The evidence comes from a close correlation between inferred changes in production rates of the cosmogenic nuclides carbon-14 and beryllium-10 and centennial to millennial time scale changes in proxies of drift ice measured in deep-sea sediment cores. A solar forcing mechanism therefore may underlie at least the Holocene segment of the North Atlantic’s “1500-year” cycle. The surface hydrographic changes may have affected production of North Atlantic Deep Water, potentially providing an additional mechanism for amplifying the solar signals and transmitting them globally.
9. Stenni, Barbara, et al. “Eight centuries of volcanic signal and climate change at Talos Dome (East Antarctica).” Journal of Geophysical Research: Atmospheres 107.D9 (2002): ACL-3.  During the 1996 Programma Nazionale di Ricerche in Antartide‐International Trans‐Antarctic Scientific Expedition traverse, two firn cores were retrieved from the Talos Dome area (East Antarctica) at elevations of 2316 m (TD, 89 m long) and 2246 m (ST556, 19 m long). Cores were dated by using seasonal variations in non‐sea‐salt (nss) SO42− concentrations coupled with the recognition of tritium marker level (1965–1966) and nss SO42− spikes due to the most important volcanic events in the past (Pinatubo 1991, Agung 1963, Krakatoa 1883, Tambora 1815, Kuwae 1452, Unknown 1259). The number of annual layers recognized in the TD and ST556 cores was 779 and 97, respectively. The δD record obtained from the TD core has been compared with other East Antarctic isotope ice core records (Dome C EPICA, South Pole, Taylor Dome). These records suggest cooler climate conditions between the middle of 16th and the beginning of 19th centuries, which might be related to the Little Ice Age (LIA) cold period. Because of the high degree of geographical variability, the strongest LIA cooling was not temporally synchronous over East Antarctica, and the analyzed records do not provide a coherent picture for East Antarctica. The accumulation rate record presented for the TD core shows a decrease during part of the LIA followed by an increment of about 11% in accumulation during the 20th century. At the ST556 site, the accumulation rate observed during the 20th century was quite stable.
10. Mayewski, Paul A. (aka Ice Man). “Holocene climate variability.” Quaternary research 62.3 (2004): 243-255. Although the dramatic climate disruptions of the last glacial period have received considerable attention, relatively little has been directed toward climate variability in the Holocene (11,500 cal yr B.P. to the present). Examination of 50 globally distributed paleoclimate records reveals as many as six periods of significant rapid climate change during the time periods 9000″8000, 6000″5000, 4200″3800, 3500″2500, 1200″1000, and 600″150 cal yr B.P. Most of the climate change events in these globally distributed records are characterized by polar cooling, tropical aridity, and major atmospheric circulation changes, although in the most recent interval (600″150 cal yr B.P.), polar cooling was accompanied by increased moisture in some parts of the tropics. Several intervals coincide with major disruptions of civilization, illustrating the human significance of Holocene climate variability.
11. Magny, Michel. “Holocene climate variability as reflected by mid-European lake-level fluctuations and its probable impact on prehistoric human settlements.” Quaternary international113.1 (2004): 65-79.  A data set of 180 radiocarbon, tree-ring and archaeological dates obtained from sediment sequences of 26 lakes in the Jura mountains, the northern French Pre-Alps and the Swiss Plateau was used to construct a Holocene mid-European lake-level record. The dates do not indicate a random distribution over the Holocene, but form clusters suggesting an alternation of lower and higher, climatically driven lake-level phases. They provide evidence of a rather unstable Holocene climate punctuated by 15 phases of higher lake-level: 11 250–11 050, 10 300–10 000, 9550–9150, 8300–8050, 7550–7250, 6350–5900, 5650–5200, 4850–4800, 4150–3950, 3500–3100, 2750–2350, 1800–1700, 1300–1100, 750–650 cal. BP and after 1394 AD. A comparison of this mid-European lake-level record with the GISP2-Polar Circulation Index (PCI) record, the North Atlantic ice-rafting debris (IRD) events and the ¹⁴C record suggests teleconnections in a complex cryosphere-ocean-atmosphere system. Correlations between the GISP2-PCI, the mid-European lake-level, the North Atlantic IRD, and the residual ¹⁴C records, suggest that changes in the solar activity played a major role in Holocene climate oscillations over the North Atlantic area.
12. Alley, Richard B., and Anna Maria Ágústsdóttir. “The 8k event: cause and consequences of a major Holocene abrupt climate change.” Quaternary Science Reviews 24.10-11 (2005): 1123-1149.  A prominent, abrupt climate event about 8200 years ago brought generally cold and dry conditions to broad northern-hemisphere regions especially in wintertime, in response to a very large outburst flood that freshened the North Atlantic. Changes were much larger than typical climate variability before and after the event, with anomalies up to many degrees contributing to major displacement of vegetative patterns. This “8k” event provides a clear case of cause and effect in the paleoclimatic realm, and so offers an excellent opportunity for model testing. The response to North Atlantic freshening has the same general anomaly pattern as observed for older events associated with abrupt climate changes following North Atlantic freshening, and so greatly strengthens the case that those older events also reflect North Atlantic changes. The North Atlantic involvement in the 8k event helps in estimating limits on climate anomalies that might result in the future if warming-caused ice-melt and hydrologic-cycle intensification at high latitudes lead to major changes in North Atlantic circulation. Few model experiments have directly addressed the 8k event, and most studies of proxy records across this event lack the time resolution to fully characterize the anomalies, so much work remains to be done.
13. Chew, Sing C. “From Harappa to Mesopotamia and Egypt to Mycenae: Dark Ages, Political-Economic Declines, and Environmental/Climatic Changes 2200 BC–700 BC.” The Historical Evolution of World-Systems. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2005. 52-74.  Considerations of hegemonic decline as a world historical process most often attempt to account for decline and collapse of complex institutions in terms of social, political, and economic processes (Gills and Frank 1992). As we increasingly question whether there are physical–environmental limits that would affect the reproduction of world-systems, political, economic, and social dimensions might not be sufficient to account for hegemonic declines. Consideration of environmental and climatological factors needs to be combined with socioeconomic relations in our understanding of hegemonic declines and shifts. This approach assumes that the humans seek to transform nature in an expansive manner, and ceaselessly amass surpluses. There are certain long periods in world history that exhibit large economic and social crises and hegemonic decline. Such long periods of economic and social distress are here termed dark ages.
14. Gorokhovich, Yuri. “Abandonment of Minoan palaces on Crete in relation to the earthquake induced changes in groundwater supply.” Journal of Archaeological Science 32.2 (2005): 217-222. Mysterious abandonment of palaces on Crete during the Late Minoan period was always a challenging problem for archeologists and geologists. Various hypotheses explained this event by effects of tsunamis, earthquakes or climatic changes that were caused by the volcanic eruption of the Santorini volcano. While each of them or their possible combination contributed to the abandonment of palaces and following Late Minoan crisis, there is another possible cause that appeared as a result of studies within the last 20–30 years. This cause is depletion of groundwater supply caused by persistent earthquake activity that took place during the Bronze Age. This explanation is supported by field observations and numerous studies of similar phenomena in other locations.
15. Wanner, Heinz, et al. “Mid-to Late Holocene climate change: an overview.” Quaternary Science Reviews 27.19-20 (2008): 1791-1828.  The last 6000 years are of particular interest to the understanding of the Earth System because the boundary conditions of the climate system did not change dramatically (in comparison to larger glacial–interglacial changes), and because abundant, detailed regional palaeoclimatic proxy records cover this period. We use selected proxy-based reconstructions of different climate variables, together with state-of-the-art time series of natural forcings (orbital variations, solar activity variations, large tropical volcanic eruptions, land cover and greenhouse gases), underpinned by results from General Circulation Models (GCMs) and Earth System Models of Intermediate Complexity (EMICs), to establish a comprehensive explanatory framework for climate changes from the Mid-Holocene (MH) to pre-industrial time. The redistribution of solar energy, due to orbital forcing on a millennial timescale, was the cause of a progressive southward shift of the Northern Hemisphere (NH) summer position of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ). This was accompanied by a pronounced weakening of the monsoon systems in Africa and Asia and increasing dryness and desertification on both continents. The associated summertime cooling of the NH, combined with changing temperature gradients in the world oceans, likely led to an increasing amplitude of the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and, possibly, increasingly negative North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO) indices up to the beginning of the last millennium. On decadal to multi-century timescales, a worldwide coincidence between solar irradiance minima, tropical volcanic eruptions and decadal to multi-century scale cooling events was not found. However, reconstructions show that widespread decadal to multi-century scale cooling events, accompanied by advances of mountain glaciers, occurred in the NH (e.g., in Scandinavia and the European Alps). This occurred namely during the Little Ice Age (LIA) between AD ∼1350 and 1850, when the lower summer insolation in the NH, due to orbital forcing, coincided with solar activity minima and several strong tropical volcanic eruptions. The role of orbital forcing in the NH cooling, the southward ITCZ shift and the desertification of the Sahara are supported by numerous model simulations. Other simulations have suggested that the fingerprint of solar activity variations should be strongest in the tropics, but there is also evidence that changes in the ocean heat transport took place during the LIA at high northern latitudes, with possible additional implications for climates of the Southern Hemisphere (SH).
16. ? Scafetta, Nicola. “Empirical evidence for a celestial origin of the climate oscillations and its implications.” Journal of Atmospheric and Solar-Terrestrial Physics 72.13 (2010): 951-970.  We investigate whether or not the decadal and multi-decadal climate oscillations have an astronomical origin. Several global surface temperature records since 1850 and records deduced from the orbits of the planets present very similar power spectra. Eleven frequencies with period between 5 and 100 years closely correspond in the two records. Among them, large climate oscillations with peak-to-trough amplitude of about 0.1 and 0.25°C, and periods of about 20 and 60 years, respectively, are synchronized to the orbital periods of Jupiter and Saturn. Schwabe and Hale solar cycles are also visible in the temperature records. A 9.1-year cycle is synchronized to the Moon’s orbital cycles. A phenomenological model based on these astronomical cycles can be used to well reconstruct the temperature oscillations since 1850 and to make partial forecasts for the 21st century. It is found that at least 60% of the global warming observed since 1970 has been induced by the combined effect of the above natural climate oscillations. The partial forecast indicates that climate may stabilize or cool until 2030–2040. Possible physical mechanisms are qualitatively discussed with an emphasis on the phenomenon of collective synchronization of coupled oscillators.
17. Tsonis, A. A., et al. “Climate change and the demise of Minoan civilization.” Climate of the Past 6.4 (2010): 525-530.  Climate change has been implicated in the success and downfall of several ancient civilizations. Here we present a synthesis of historical, climatic, and geological evidence that supports the hypothesis that climate change may have been responsible for the slow demise of Minoan civilization. Using proxy ENSO and precipitation reconstruction data in the period 1650–1980 we present empirical and quantitative evidence that El Nino causes drier conditions in the area of Crete. This result is supported by modern data analysis as well as by model simulations. Though not very strong, the ENSO-Mediterranean drying signal appears to be robust, and its overall effect was accentuated by a series of unusually strong and long-lasting El Nino events during the time of the Minoan decline. Indeed, a change in the dynamics of the El Nino/Southern Oscillation (ENSO) system occurred around 3000 BC, which culminated in a series of strong and frequent El Nino events starting at about 1450 BC and lasting for several centuries. This stressful climatic trend, associated with the gradual demise of the Minoans, is argued to be an important force acting in the downfall of this classic and long-lived civilization.  FULL TEXT DOWNLOAD
18. Wanner, Heinz, et al. “Structure and origin of Holocene cold events.” Quaternary Science Reviews 30.21-22 (2011): 3109-3123. The present interglacial, the Holocene, spans the period of the last 11,700 years. It has sustained the growth and development of modern society. The millennial-scale decreasing solar insolation in the Northern Hemisphere summer lead to Northern Hemisphere cooling, a southern shift of the Intertropical Convergence Zone (ITCZ) and a weakening of the Northern Hemisphere summer monsoon systems. On the multidecadal to multicentury-scale, periods of more stable and warmer climate were interrupted by several cold relapses, at least in the Northern Hemisphere extra-tropical area. Based on carefully selected 10,000-year-long time series of temperature and humidity/precipitation, as well as reconstructions of glacier advances, the spatiotemporal pattern of six cold relapses during the last 10,000 years was analysed and presented in form of a Holocene Climate Atlas (HOCLAT; see http://www.oeschger.unibe.ch/research/projects/holocene_atlas/). A clear cyclicity was not found, and the spatiotemporal variability of temperature and humidity/precipitation during the six specific cold events (8200, 6300, 4700, 2700, 1550 and 550 years BP) was very high. Different dynamical processes such as meltwater flux into the North Atlantic, low solar activity, explosive volcanic eruptions, and fluctuations of the thermohaline circulation likely played a major role. In addition, internal dynamics in the North Atlantic and Pacific area (including their complex interaction) were likely involved. AUTHOR’S NOTES: {Based on temperature, humidity and glacier data, we analyze Holocene cold events. During the Holocene a clear cyclicity between warm and cold periods was not found.  Single cold relapses are subject to different dynamical processes. The six analyzed cold events show different spatial structures.}
19. Humlum, Ole, Jan-Erik Solheim, and Kjell Stordahl. “Identifying natural contributions to late Holocene climate change.” Global and Planetary Change 79.1-2 (2011): 145-156.  Analytic climate models have provided the means to predict potential impacts on future climate by anthropogenic changes in atmospheric composition. However, future climate development will not only be influenced by anthropogenic changes, but also by natural variations. The knowledge on such natural variations and their detailed character, however, still remains incomplete. Here we present a new technique to identify the character of natural climate variations, and from this, to produce testable forecast of future climate. By means of Fourier and wavelet analyses climate series are decomposed into time–frequency space, to extract information on periodic signals embedded in the data series and their amplitude and variation over time. We chose to exemplify the potential of this technique by analysing two climate series, the Svalbard (78°N) surface air temperature series 1912–2010, and the last 4000 years of the reconstructed GISP2 surface temperature series from central Greenland. By this we are able to identify several cyclic climate variations which appear persistent on the time scales investigated. Finally, we demonstrate how such persistent natural variations can be used for hindcasting and forecasting climate. Our main focus is on identifying the character (timing, period, amplitude) of such recurrent natural climate variations, but we also comment on the likely physical explanations for some of the identified cyclic climate variations. The causes of millennial climate changes remain poorly understood, and this issue remains important for understanding causes for natural climate variability over decadal- and decennial time scales. We argue that Fourier and wavelet approaches like ours may contribute towards improved understanding of the role of such recurrent natural climate variations in the future climate development.
20. Drake, Brandon L. “The influence of climatic change on the Late Bronze Age Collapse and the Greek Dark Ages.” Journal of Archaeological Science 39.6 (2012): 1862-1870.  Between the 13th and 11th centuries BCE, most Greek Bronze Age Palatial centers were destroyed and/or abandoned. The following centuries were typified by low population levels. Data from oxygen-isotope speleothems, stable carbon isotopes, alkenone-derived seasurface temperatures, and changes in warm-species dinocysts and formanifera in the Mediterranean indicate that the Early Iron Age was more arid than the preceding Bronze Age. A sharp increase in Northern Hemisphere temperatures preceded the collapse of Palatial centers, a sharp decrease occurred during their abandonment. Mediterranean Seasurface temperatures cooled rapidly during the Late Bronze Age, limiting freshwater flux into the atmosphere and thus reducing precipitation over land. These climatic changes could have affected Palatial centers that were dependent upon high levels of agricultural productivity. Declines in agricultural production would have made higher-density populations in Palatial centers unsustainable. The ‘Greek Dark Ages’ that followed occurred during prolonged arid conditions that lasted until the Roman Warm Period.

CHAOS THEORY IN CLIMATE SCIENCE: A BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Zeng, Xubin, Roger A. Pielke, and R. Eykholt. “Chaos theory and its applications to the atmosphere.” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 74.4 (1993): 631-644.  A brief overview of chaos theory is presented, including bifurcations, routes to turbulence, and methods for characterizing chaos. The paper divides chaos applications in atmospheric sciences into three categories: new ideas and insights inspired by chaos, analysis of observational data, and analysis of output from numerical models. Based on the review of chaos theory and the classification of chaos applications, suggestions for future work are given.
2. Marotzke, Jochem. “Abrupt climate change and thermohaline circulation: Mechanisms and predictability.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 97.4 (2000): 1347-1350.  The ocean’s thermohaline circulation has long been recognized as potentially unstable and has consequently been invoked as a potential cause of abrupt climate change on all timescales of decades and longer. However, fundamental aspects of thermohaline circulation changes remain poorly understood. [LINK TO FULL TEXT PDF]
3. Rial, Jose A., and C. A. Anaclerio. “Understanding nonlinear responses of the climate system to orbital forcing.” Quaternary Science Reviews 19.17-18 (2000): 1709-1722.  Frequency modulation (FM) of the orbital eccentricity forcing may be one important source of the nonlinearities observed in δ¹⁸O time series from deep-sea sediment cores (J.H. Rial (1999a) Pacemaking the lce Ages by frequency modulation of Earth’s orbital eccentricity. Science 285, 564–568). Here we present further evidence of frequency modulation found in data from the Vostok ice core. Analyses of the 430,000-year long, orbitally untuned, time series of CO₂, deuterium, aerosol and methane, suggest frequency modulation of the 41 kyr (0.0244 kyr⁻¹) obliquity forcing by the 413 kyr-eccentricity signal and its harmonics. Conventional and higher-order spectral analyses show that two distinct spectral peaks at ∼29 kyr (0.034 kyr⁻¹) and ∼69 kyr (0.014 kyr⁻¹) and other, smaller peaks surrounding the 41 kyr obliquity peak are harmonically (nonlinearly) related and likely to be FM-generated sidebands of the obliquity signal. All peaks can be closely matched by the spectrum of an appropriately built theoretical FM signal. A preliminary model, based on the classic logistic growth delay differential equation, reproduces the longer period FM effect and the familiar multiply peaked spectra of the eccentricity band. Since the FM effect appears to be a common feature in climate response, finding out its cause may help understand climate dynamics and global climate change.
4. Ashkenazy, Yosef, et al. “Nonlinearity and multifractality of climate change in the past 420,000 years.” Geophysical research letters 30.22 (2003).  Evidence of past climate variations are stored in polar ice caps and indicate glacial‐interglacial cycles of ∼100 kyr. Using advanced scaling techniques we study the long‐range correlation properties of temperature proxy records of four ice cores from Antarctica and Greenland. These series are long‐range correlated in the time scales of 1–100 kyr. We show that these time series are nonlinear for time scales of 1–100 kyr as expressed by temporal long‐range correlations of magnitudes of temperature increments and by a broad multifractal spectrum. Our results suggest that temperature increments appear in clusters of big and small increments—a big (positive or negative) climate change is most likely followed by a big (positive or negative) climate change and a small climate change is most likely followed by a small climate change.
5. Rial, Jose A. “Abrupt climate change: chaos and order at orbital and millennial scales.” Global and Planetary Change 41.2 (2004): 95-109.  Successful prediction of future global climate is critically dependent on understanding its complex history, some of which is displayed in paleoclimate time series extracted from deep-sea sediment and ice cores. These recordings exhibit frequent episodes of abrupt climate change believed to be the result of nonlinear response of the climate system to internal or external forcing, yet, neither the physical mechanisms nor the nature of the nonlinearities involved are well understood. At the orbital (10⁴–10⁵ years) and millennial scales, abrupt climate change appears as sudden, rapid warming events, each followed by periods of slow cooling. The sequence often forms a distinctive saw-tooth shaped time series, epitomized by the deep-sea records of the last million years and the Dansgaard–Oeschger (D/O) oscillations of the last glacial. Here I introduce a simplified mathematical model consisting of a novel arrangement of coupled nonlinear differential equations that appears to capture some important physics of climate change at Milankovitch and millennial scales, closely reproducing the saw-tooth shape of the deep-sea sediment and ice core time series, the relatively abrupt mid-Pleistocene climate switch, and the intriguing D/O oscillations. Named LODE for its use of the logistic-delayed differential equation, the model combines simplicity in the formulation (two equations, small number of adjustable parameters) and sufficient complexity in the dynamics (infinite-dimensional nonlinear delay differential equation) to accurately simulate details of climate change other simplified models cannot. Close agreement with available data suggests that the D/O oscillations are frequency modulated by the third harmonic of the precession forcing, and by the precession itself, but the entrained response is intermittent, mixed with intervals of noise, which corresponds well with the idea that the climate operates at the edge between chaos and order. LODE also predicts a persistent ∼1.5 ky oscillation that results from the frequency modulated regional climate oscillation.
6. Huybers, Peter, and Carl Wunsch. “Obliquity pacing of the late Pleistocene glacial terminations.” Nature 434.7032 (2005): 491.  The 100,000-year timescale in the glacial/interglacial cycles of the late Pleistocene epoch (the past ∼700,000 years) is commonly attributed to control by variations in the Earth’s orbit¹. This hypothesis has inspired models that depend on the Earth’s obliquity (∼ 40,000 yr; ∼40 kyr), orbital eccentricity (∼ 100 kyr) and precessional (∼ 20 kyr) fluctuations^2,3,4,5, with the emphasis usually on eccentricity and precessional forcing. According to a contrasting hypothesis, the glacial cycles arise primarily because of random internal climate variability^6,7,8. Taking these two perspectives together, there are currently more than thirty different models of the seven late-Pleistocene glacial cycles⁹. Here we present a statistical test of the orbital forcing hypothesis, focusing on the rapid deglaciation events known as terminations^10,11. According to our analysis, the null hypothesis that glacial terminations are independent of obliquity can be rejected at the 5% significance level, whereas the corresponding null hypotheses for eccentricity and precession cannot be rejected. The simplest inference consistent with the test results is that the ice sheets terminated every second or third obliquity cycle at times of high obliquity, similar to the original proposal by Milankovitch¹². We also present simple stochastic and deterministic models that describe the timing of the late-Pleistocene glacial terminations purely in terms of obliquity forcing.
7. Tziperman, Eli, Carl Wunsch. “Consequences of pacing the Pleistocene 100 kyr ice ages by nonlinear phase locking to Milankovitch forcing.” Paleoceanography 21.4 (2006).:    The consequences of the hypothesis that Milankovitch forcing affects the phase (e.g., termination times) of the 100 kyr glacial cycles via a mechanism known as “nonlinear phase locking” are examined. Phase locking provides a mechanism by which Milankovitch forcing can act as the “pacemaker” of the glacial cycles. Nonlinear phase locking can determine the timing of the major deglaciations, nearly independently of the specific mechanism or model that is responsible for these cycles as long as this mechanism is suitably nonlinear. A consequence of this is that the fit of a certain model output to the observed ice volume record cannot be used as an indication that the glacial mechanism in this model is necessarily correct. Phase locking to obliquity and possibly precession variations is distinct from mechanisms relying on a linear or nonlinear amplification of the eccentricity forcing. Nonlinear phase locking may determine the phase of the glacial cycles even in the presence of noise in the climate system and can be effective at setting glacial termination times even when the precession and obliquity bands account only for a small portion of the total power of an ice volume record. Nonlinear phase locking can also result in the observed “quantization” of the glacial period into multiples of the obliquity or precession periods.
8. Eisenman, Ian, Norbert Untersteiner, and J. S. Wettlaufer. “On the reliability of simulated Arctic sea ice in global climate models.” Geophysical Research Letters 34.10 (2007).  While most of the global climate models (GCMs) currently being evaluated for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report simulate present‐day Arctic sea ice in reasonably good agreement with observations, the intermodel differences in simulated Arctic cloud cover are large and produce significant differences in downwelling longwave radiation. Using the standard thermodynamic models of sea ice, we find that the GCM‐generated spread in longwave radiation produces equilibrium ice thicknesses that range from 1 to more than 10 meters. However, equilibrium ice thickness is an extremely sensitive function of the ice albedo, allowing errors in simulated cloud cover to be compensated by tuning of the ice albedo. This analysis suggests that the results of current GCMs cannot be relied upon at face value for credible predictions of future Arctic sea ice.
9. Frank, Patrick, and John McCarthy. “A climate of belief.” Skeptic 14.1 (2008): 22-30. The claim that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the current warming of Earth climate is scientifically insupportable because climate models are unreliable by Patrick Frank “He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense.” — John McCarthy “The latest scientific data confirm that the earth’s climate is rapidly changing. … The cause? A thickening layer of carbon dioxide pollution, mostly from power plants and automobiles, that traps heat in the atmosphere. … *A+verage U.S. temperatures could rise another 3 to 9 degrees by the end of the century … Sea levels will rise, *and h+eat waves will be more frequent and more intense. Droughts and wildfires will occur more often. Disease-carrying mosquitoes will expand their range. And species will be pushed to extinction.” So says the National Resources Defense Council,2 with agreement by the Sierra Club,3 Greenpeace,4 National Geographic,5 the US National Academy of Sciences,6 and the US Congressional House leadership.7 Concurrent views are widespread,8 as a visit to the internet or any good bookstore will verify. Since at least the 1995 Second Assessment Report, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been making increasingly assured statements that human-produced carbon dioxide (CO2) is influencing the climate, and is the chief cause of the global warming trend in evidence since about 1900. The current level of atmospheric CO2 is about 390 parts per million by volume (ppmv), or 0.039% by volume of the atmosphere, and in 1900 was about 295 ppmv. If the 20th century trend continues unabated, by about 2050 atmospheric CO2 will have doubled to about 600 ppmv. This is the basis for the usual “doubled CO2” scenario. Doubled CO2 is a bench-mark for climate scientists in evaluating greenhouse warming. Earth receives about 342 watts per square meter (W/m2 ) of incoming solar energy, and all of this energy eventually finds its way back out into space. However, CO2 and other greenhouse gasses, most notably water vapor, absorb some of the outgoing energy and warm the atmosphere. This is the greenhouse effect. Without it Earth’s average surface temperature would be a frigid -19°C (-2.2 F). With it, the surface warms to about +14°C (57 F) overall, making Earth habitable.9 With more CO2, more outgoing radiant energy is absorbed, changing the thermal dynamics of
   the atmosphere. All the extra greenhouse gasses that have entered the atmosphere since 1900, including CO2, equate to an extra 2.7 W/m2 of energy absorption by the atmosphere.10 This is the worrisome greenhouse effect. On February 2, 2007, the IPCC released the Working Group I (WGI) “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) report on Earth climate,11 which is an executive summary of the science supporting the predictions quoted above. The full “Fourth Assessment Report” (4AR) came out in sections during 2007.  [LINK TO FULL TEXT PDF]
10. Huybers, Peter John. “Pleistocene glacial variability as a chaotic response to obliquity forcing.” (2009).  The mid-Pleistocene Transition from 40 ky to ~100 ky glacial cycles is generally characterized as a singular transition attributable to scouring of continental regolith or a long-term decrease in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Here an alternative hypothesis is suggested, that Pleistocene glacial variability is chaotic and that transitions from 40 ky to ~100 ky modes of variability occur spontaneously. This alternate view is consistent with the presence of ~80 ky glacial cycles during the early Pleistocene and the lack of evidence for a change in climate forcing during the mid-Pleistocene. A simple model illustrates this chaotic scenario. When forced at a 40 ky period the model chaotically transitions between small 40 ky glacial cycles and larger 80 and 120 ky cycles which, on average, give the ~100 ky variability.
11. Dima, Mihai, and Gerrit Lohmann. “Conceptual model for millennial climate variability: a possible combined solar-thermohaline circulation origin for the~ 1,500-year cycle.” Climate Dynamics 32.2-3 (2009): 301-311.  Dansgaard-Oeschger and Heinrich events are the most pronounced climatic changes over the last 120,000 years. Although many of their properties were derived from climate reconstructions, the associated physical mechanisms are not yet fully understood. These events are paced by a ~1,500-year periodicity whose origin remains unclear. In a conceptual model approach, we show that this millennial variability can originate from rectification of an external (solar) forcing, and suggest that the thermohaline circulation, through a threshold response, could be the rectifier. We argue that internal threshold response of the thermohaline circulation (THC) to solar forcing is more likely to produce the observed DO cycles than amplification of weak direct ~1,500-year forcing of unknown origin, by THC. One consequence of our concept is that the millennial variability is viewed as a derived mode without physical processes on its characteristic time scale. Rather, the mode results from the linear representation in the Fourier space of nonlinearly transformed fundamental modes.
12. Dijkstra, Henk A. Nonlinear climate dynamics. Cambridge University Press, 2013.  

EARLY HOLOCENE SEA LEVEL RISE & 8.2K EVENT

1. Hori, Kazuaki, and Yoshiki Saito. “An early Holocene sea‐level jump and delta initiation.” Geophysical Research Letters 34.18 (2007).  Early Holocene sea‐level change controlled the evolution of classic coastal depositional systems. Radiocarbon‐dated borehole cores obtained from three incised‐valley‐fill systems in Asia (Changjiang, Song Hong, and Kiso River) record very similar depositional histories, especially between about 9000 and 8500 cal BP. Sedimentary facies changes from estuarine sand and mud to shelf or prodelta mud suggest that the marine influence in the incised valleys increased during this period. In addition, large decreases in sediment accumulation rates occurred. A sea‐level jump causes an estuarine system and its depocenter to move rapidly landward. It is possible that the final collapse of the Laurentide Ice Sheet, accompanied by catastrophic drainage of glacial lakes, at approximately 8500 cal BP caused such a jump. The jump was followed immediately by a period of decelerated sea‐level rise that promoted delta initiation.
2. Vink, Annemiek, et al. “Holocene relative sea-level change, isostatic subsidence and the radial viscosity structure of the mantle of northwest Europe (Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, southern North Sea).” Quaternary Science Reviews26.25-28 (2007): 3249-3275.  A comprehensive observational database of Holocene relative sea-level (RSL) index points from northwest Europe (Belgium, the Netherlands, northwest Germany, southern North Sea) has been compiled in order to compare and reassess the data collected from the different countries/regions and by different workers on a common time–depth scale. RSL rise varies in magnitude and form between these regions, revealing a complex pattern of differential crustal movement which cannot be solely attributed to tectonic activity. It clearly contains a non-linear, glacio- and/or hydro-isostatic subsidence component, which is only small on the Belgian coastal plain but increases significantly to a value of ca 7.5 m relative to Belgium since 8 cal. ka BP along the northwest German coast. The subsidence is at least in part related to the Post-Glacial collapse of the so-called peripheral forebulge which developed around the Fennoscandian centre of ice loading during the Last Glacial Maximum. The RSL data have been compared to geodynamic Earth models in order to infer the radial viscosity structure of the Earth’s mantle underneath NW Europe (lithosphere thickness, upper- and lower-mantle viscosity), and conversely to predict RSL in regions where we have only few observational data (e.g. in the southern North Sea). A very broad range of Earth parameters fit the Belgian RSL data, suggesting that glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) only had a minor effect on Belgian crustal dynamics during and after the Last Ice Age. In contrast, a narrow range of Earth parameters define the southern North Sea region, reflecting the greater influence of GIA on these deeper/older samples. Modelled RSL data suggest that the zone of maximum forebulge subsidence runs in a relatively narrow, WNW–ESE trending band connecting the German federal state of Lower Saxony with the Dogger Bank area in the southern North Sea. Identification of the effects of local-scale factors such as past changes in tidal range or tectonic activity on the spatial and temporal variations of sea-level index points based on model-data comparisons is possible but is still complicated by the relatively large range of Earth model parameters fitting each RSL curve, emphasizing the need for more high-quality observational data.
3. Kendall, Roblyn A., et al. “The sea-level fingerprint of the 8.2 ka climate event.” Geology 36.5 (2008): 423-426.  The 8.2 ka cooling event was an abrupt, widespread climate instability. There is general consensus that the episode was likely initiated by a catastrophic outflow of proglacial Lakes Agassiz and Ojibway through the Hudson Strait, with subsequent disruption of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. However, the total discharge and flux during the 8.2 ka event remain uncertain. We compute the sea-level signature, or “fingerprint,” associated with the drainage of Lakes Agassiz and Ojibway, as well as the expected sea-level signal over the same time period due to glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA) in response to the Late Pleistocene deglaciation. Our analysis demonstrates that sites relatively close to the lakes, including the West and Gulf Coasts of the United States, have small signals due to the lake release and potentially large GIA signals, and thus they may not be optimal field sites for constraining the outflow volume. Other sites, such as the east coast of South America and western Africa, have significantly larger signals associated with the lake release and are thus better choices in this regard.
4. Hijma, Marc P., and Kim M. Cohen. “Timing and magnitude of the sea-level jump preluding the 8200 yr event.” Geology 38.3 (2010): 275-278.  Evidence from terrestrial, glacial, and global climate model reconstructions suggests that a sea-level jump caused by meltwater release was associated with the triggering of the 8.2 ka cooling event. However, there has been no direct measurement of this jump using precise sea-level data. In addition, the chronology of the meltwater pulse is based on marine data with limited dating accuracy. The most plausible mechanism for triggering the cooling event is the sudden, possibly multistaged drainage of the Laurentide proglacial Lakes Agassiz and Ojibway through the Hudson Strait into the North Atlantic ca. 8470 ± 300 yr ago. Here we show with detailed sea-level data from Rotterdam, Netherlands, that the sea-level rise commenced 8450 ± 44 yr ago. Our timing considerably narrows the existing age of this drainage event and provides support for the hypothesis of a double-staged lake drainage. The jump in sea level reached a local magnitude of 2.11 ± 0.89 m within 200 yr, in addition to the ongoing background relative sea-level rise (1.95 ± 0.74 m). This magnitude, observed at considerable distance from the release site, points to a global-averaged eustatic sea-level jump that is double the size of previous estimates (3.0 ± 1.2 m versus 0.4–1.4 m). The discrepancy suggests either a coeval Antarctic contribution or, more likely, a previous underestimate of the total American lake drainage.
5. Bard, Edouard, Bruno Hamelin, and Doriane Delanghe-Sabatier. “Deglacial meltwater pulse 1B and Younger Dryas sea levels revisited with boreholes at Tahiti.” Science327.5970 (2010): 1235-1237.  Reconstructing sea-level changes during the last deglaciation provides a way of understanding the ice dynamics that can perturb large continental ice sheets. The resolution of the few sea-level records covering the critical time interval between 14,000 and 9,000 YBP calendar years before the present is still insufficient to draw conclusions about sea-level changes associated with the Younger Dryas cold event and the meltwater pulse 1B (MWP-1B). We used the uranium-thorium method to date shallow-living corals from three new cores drilled onshore in the Tahiti barrier reef. No significant discontinuity can be detected in the sea-level rise during the MWP-1B period. The new Tahiti sea-level record shows that the sea-level rise slowed down during the Younger Dryas before accelerating again during the Holocene.
6. Smith, D. E., et al. “The early Holocene sea level rise.” Quaternary Science Reviews 30.15-16 (2011): 1846-1860.  The causes, anatomy and consequences of the early Holocene sea level rise (EHSLR) are reviewed. The rise, of ca 60m, took place over most of the Earth as the volume of the oceans increased during deglaciation and is dated at 11,650–7000 cal. BP. The EHSLR was largely driven by meltwater release from decaying ice masses and the break up of coastal ice streams. The patterns of ice sheet decay and the evidence for meltwater pulses are reviewed, and it is argued that the EHSLR was a factor in the ca 8470 BP flood from Lake Agassiz-Ojibway. Patterns of relative sea level changes are examined and it is argued that in addition to regional variations, temporal changes are indicated. The impact of the EHSLR on climate is reviewed and it is maintained that the event was a factor in the 8200 BP cooling event, as well as in changes in ocean current patterns and their resultant effects. The EHSLR may also have enhanced volcanic activity, but no clear evidence of a causal link with submarine sliding on continental slopes and shelves can yet be demonstrated. The rise probably influenced rates and patterns of human migrations and cultural changes. It is concluded that the EHSLR was a major event of global significance, knowledge of which is relevant to an understanding of the impacts of global climate change in the future. Highlights:  1. Reviews the early Holocene sea level rise of 11650–7000 cal. BP. 2. Argues that the rise was involved in the discharge of Lake Agassiz-Ojibway and the 8200-year cooling event. 3. Shows that he rise influenced climate by increasing sea areas, in turn affecting human migration. 4. Suggests that the rise increased volcanic activity, but that its effects on submarine sliding are uncertain. 5. Argues that study of the rise helps throw light on the effects of future sea level changes in a global warming world.
7. Hijma, Marc P., and Kim M. Cohen. “Holocene transgression of the Rhine river mouth area, The Netherlands/Southern North Sea: palaeogeography and sequence stratigraphy.” Sedimentology 58.6 (2011): 1453-1485.  This study presents a detailed reconstruction of the palaeogeography of the Rhine valley (western Netherlands) during the Holocene transgression with systems tracts placed in a precise sea‐level context. This approach permits comparison of actual versus conceptual boundaries of the lowstand, transgressive and highstand systems tracts. The inland position of the highstand Rhine river mouth on a wide, low‐gradient continental shelf meant that base‐level changes were the dominant control on sedimentation for a relatively short period of the last glacial cycle. Systems in such inland positions predominantly record changes in the balance between river discharge and sediment load, and preserve excellent records of climatic changes or other catchment‐induced forcing. It is shown here that the transgressive systems tract‐part of the coastal prism formed in three stages: (i) the millennium before 8·45 ka bp, when the area was dominated by fluvial environments with extensive wetlands; (ii) the millennium after 8·45 ka, characterized by strong erosion, increasing tidal amplitudes and bay‐head delta development; and (iii) the period between 7·5 and 6·3 ka bp when the Rhine avulsed multiple times and the maximum flooding surface formed. The diachroneity of the transgressive surface is strongly suppressed because of a pulse of accelerated sea‐level rise at 8·45 ka bp. That event not only had a strong effect on preservation, but has circum‐oceanic stratigraphical relevance as it divides the early and middle Holocene parts of coastal successions worldwide. The palaeogeographical reconstruction offers a unique full spatial–temporal view on the coastal and fluvial dynamics of a major river mouth under brief rapid forced transgression. This reconstruction is of relevance for Holocene and ancient transgressive systems worldwide, and for next‐century natural coasts that are predicted to experience a 1 m sea‐level rise.
8. Hijma, Marc P., et al. “Pleistocene Rhine–Thames landscapes: geological background for hominin occupation of the southern North Sea region.” Journal of Quaternary Science 27.1 (2012): 17-39.  This paper links research questions in Quaternary geology with those in Palaeolithic archaeology. A detailed geological reconstruction of The Netherlands’ south‐west offshore area provides a stratigraphical context for archaeological and palaeontological finds. Progressive environmental developments have left a strong imprint on the area’s Palaeolithic record. We highlight aspects of landscape evolution and related taphonomical changes, visualized in maps for critical periods of the Pleistocene in the wider southern North Sea region. The Middle Pleistocene record is divided into two palaeogeographical stages: the pre‐Anglian/Elsterian stage, during which a wide land bridge existed between England and Belgium even during marine highstands; and the Anglian/Elsterian to Saalian interglacial, with a narrower land bridge, lowered by proglacial erosion but not yet fully eroded. The Late Pleistocene landscape was very different, with the land bridge fully dissected by an axial Rhine–Thames valley, eroded deep enough to fully connect the English Channel and the North Sea during periods of highstand. This tripartite staging implies great differences in (i) possible migration routes of herds of herbivores as well as hominins preying upon them, (ii) the erosion base of axial and tributary rivers causing an increase in the availability of flint raw materials and (iii) conditions for loess accumulation in northern France and Belgium and the resulting preservation of Middle Palaeolithic sites.
9. Törnqvist, Torbjörn E., and Marc P. Hijma. “Links between early Holocene ice-sheet decay, sea-level rise and abrupt climate change.” Nature Geoscience 5.9 (2012): 601.  The beginning of the current interglacial period, the Holocene epoch, was a critical part of the transition from glacial to interglacial climate conditions. This period, between about 12,000 and 7,000 years ago, was marked by the continued retreat of the ice sheets that had expanded through polar and temperate regions during the preceding glacial. This meltdown led to a dramatic rise in sea level, punctuated by short-lived jumps associated with catastrophic ice-sheet collapses. Tracking down which ice sheet produced specific sea-level jumps has been challenging, but two events between 8,500 and 8,200 years ago have been linked to the final drainage of glacial Lake Agassiz in north-central North America. The release of the water from this ice-dammed lake into the ocean is recorded by sea-level jumps in the Mississippi and Rhine-Meuse deltas of approximately 0.4 and 2.1 metres, respectively. These sea-level jumps can be related to an abrupt cooling in the Northern Hemisphere known as the 8.2 kyr event, and it has been suggested that the freshwater release from Lake Agassiz into the North Atlantic was sufficient to perturb the North Atlantic meridional overturning circulation. As sea-level rise on the order of decimetres to metres can now be detected with confidence and linked to climate records, it is becoming apparent that abrupt climate change during the early Holocene associated with perturbations in North Atlantic circulation required sustained freshwater release into the ocean.
10. Sturt, Fraser, Duncan Garrow, and Sarah Bradley. “New models of North West European Holocene palaeogeography and inundation.” Journal of Archaeological Science 40.11 (2013): 3963-3976. Highlights: New Palaeogeographic models of North West Europe from 11,000 BP to present day at 500 year intervals. Calculated rates for Holocene inundation across North West Europe. High rates of change do not necessarily mean catastrophic impacts. Understanding rates of change and their social implications requires a multi-scalar, multidisciplinary approach to the past.Abstract: This paper presents new 500 year interval palaeogeographic models for Britain, Ireland and the North West French coast from 11000 cal. BP to present. These models are used to calculate the varying rates of inundation for different geographical zones over the study period. This allows for consideration of the differential impact that Holocene sea-level rise had across space and time, and on past societies. In turn, consideration of the limitations of the models helps to foreground profitable areas for future research.

[HOME PAGE]

303 species, each with at. least 1 stem. In 1990.

Richness = the number of species. Evenness or relative abundance = extent to which numbers of individuals of different species are equal or skewed. Speciation generates new species and adds to species richness. Extinction reduces species richness.

Generally exclude accidental species in the count. Does not take into account abundance patterns among the various species. Species counts depend on the sample size or sample area (rarely do you get every one!) Equilibrium model of island biogeography (MacArthur & Wilson, 1967) # of species (species richness) on an island is determined by immigration and emigration of species. Larger islands and islands closer to mainland will have greater species richness.

[LIST OF POSTS ON THIS SITE]

SPECIES ABUNDANCE, DIVERSITY, RICHNESS STUDIES: BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Volterra, Vito. “Fluctuations in the abundance of a species considered mathematically.” (1926): 558.  Dynamics of predator species and prey species are used to develop a nonlinear model for the interpretation of specie abundance data. Full text pdf provided.
2. Colautti, Robert I., Igor A. Grigorovich, and Hugh J. MacIsaac. “Propagule pressure: a null model for biological invasions.” Biological Invasions 8.5 (2006): 1023-1037.  Invasion ecology must explain the ability of species to establish in, spread to, or become abundant in novel communities and the susceptibility of habitats to the establishment or proliferation of invaders. Abundant invaders generally occupy similar habitats as native species, while abundant species tend to be less affected by enemies. Germination success and reproductive output are significantly positively associated with invasiveness when results from both stages were combined. We also found that propagule pressure was a significant predictor of both invasiveness and conclude that propagule pressure should serve as the basis of a null model for studies of biological invasions when inferring process from patterns of invasion.
3. Brown, James H., David W. Mehlman, and George C. Stevens. “Spatial variation in abundance.” Ecology 76.7 (1995): 2028-2043. The abundance of bird species varies in a systematic way over the geographic range, exhibiting positive spatial autocorrelation at small distances and a tendency to increase from the edges toward the center of the range. The magnitude and pattern of spatial variation in local population density has important implications for basic ecology and biogeography, especially for the dynamics and regulation of abundance on both space and time, the limits and internal structure of the geographic range, and the interspecific variation in abundance observed within local communities.
4. Yoccoz, Nigel G., James D. Nichols, and Thierry Boulinier. “Monitoring of biological diversity in space and time.” Trends in ecology & evolution 16.8 (2001): 446-453.  Monitoring programmes are being used increasingly to assess spatial and temporal trends of biological diversity, with an emphasis on evaluating the efficiency of management policies. Recent reviews of the existing programmes, with a focus on their design in particular, have highlighted the main weaknesses: the lack of well-articulated objectives and the neglect of different sources of error in the estimation of biological diversity. We review recent developments in methods and designs that aim to integrate sources of error to provide unbiased estimates of change in biological diversity and to suggest the potential causes.
5. Connor, Edward F., and Earl D. McCoy. “The statistics and biology of the species-area relationship.” The American Naturalist 113.6 (1979): 791-833. 
6. Lawton, John H. “Range, population abundance and conservation.” Trends in ecology & evolution 8.11 (1993): 409-413. Several patterns in the distribution and abundance of organisms have now been documented. They include broad (but not universal) positive correlations between range sizes and population abundances; a decline in the proportion of sites occupied and in average population densities from the centre to the edge of a species’ range, with either unimodal or multimodal peaks of abundance and occupancy in the core of the range; and intriguing, but still poorly documented phylogenetic effects on both range size and abundance. All these patterns require further work to establish their generality, and all of them lack generally agreed explanations. They are important, however, not only theoretically but also practically, because of the constraints and opportunities they appear to provide for the management and conservation of species.
7. Roberts, Callum M., and Rupert FG Ormond. “Habitat complexity and coral reef fish diversity and abundance on Red Sea fringing reefs.” Marine Ecology Progress Series (1987): 1-8.
8. Gascon, Claude, et al. “Matrix habitat and species richness in tropical forest remnants.” Biological conservation 91.2-3 (1999): 223-229. The abilities of species to use the matrix of modified habitats surrounding forest fragments may affect their vulnerability in fragmented landscapes. We used long-term (up to 19-year) studies of four animal groups in central Amazonia to test whether species’ abundances in the matrix were correlated with their relative extinction proneness in forest fragments. The four groups, birds, frogs, small mammals, and ants, had varying overall responses to fragmentation: species richness of small mammals and frogs increased after fragment isolation, whereas that of birds and ants decreased. For all four groups, a high proportion of nominally primary-forest species were detected in matrix habitats, with 8–25% of species in each group found exclusively in the matrix. The three vertebrate groups (birds, small mammals, frogs) exhibited positive and significant correlations between matrix abundance and vulnerability to fragmentation, suggesting that species that avoid the matrix tend to decline or disappear in fragments, while those that tolerate or exploit the matrix often remain stable or increase. These results highlight the importance of the matrix in the dynamics and composition of vertebrate communities in tropical forest remnants, and have important implications for the management of fragmented landscapes.

   FEATURED RESEARCHERS 

[LIST OF POSTS ON THIS SITE]

Species Abundance Biology in the Climate Change era  

[LINK]