J Storrs Hall provides a 50,000 year graph of temperature in Greenland. The data is estimated from ice core samples, but not adjusted afterwards.
10 degree swings, not an industry in sight
Gosh, aren’t we lucky to live now, when it is warm, because toasty sure ain’t the norm:
In other words, we’re pretty lucky to be here during this rare, warm period in climate history. But the broader lesson is, climate doesn’t stand still. It doesn’t even stay on the relatively constrained range of the last 10,000 years for more than about 10,000 years at a time.
This backs my case that we have to prepare society for the worst, mainly through economic and technical progress. Cold is the norm. Warming, no matter the cause, should be welcomed not fought.
December 10th, 2009 at 9:19 pm
We would welcome some warming in the SanPete Valley. It has been -30
degrees for the last three nights and anticipate -20 for tonite. That is way below my comfort zone. Even St George was in low 20′s for the past couple of nights.
December 11th, 2009 at 5:20 am
I note that Hall avoids predicting the future, I presume because he realizes that extrapolation relies on the underlying mechanisms not having changed. What has changed that we know about over the last few hundred years is a dramatic rise in population, agriculture, and burning of carbon fossil fuels. If these are minor influences on climate, then you can safely predict a substantial temperature decline that repeats the 10000 year cycle. As a warning that things might have changed substantially, we’ll need to explain why the temperatures following the last peak have dropped sharply as they did in the previous four cycles. The graph shows a hundred year elevated average temperature over a range of less than two degrees whereas the previous cycle temperatures dropped by two degrees with little hesitation on their way to minus six degrees in thousand years or so. All of which suggests a change in the underlying mechanism of climate variation. And if substantial change has happened, we’ll need some kind of a model to understand its effect and make new predictions. Which is what all the hullabaloo is about as wishes compete with facts and analysis.
December 11th, 2009 at 8:06 am
Note a critical dropped word: “we’ll need to explain why the temperatures following the last peak have NOT dropped sharply as they did in the previous four cycles.”
December 11th, 2009 at 9:51 am
I repeat: when Al Gore sells his mansion that uses 200 times more power than the average household ( he owns three homes, including a 9000 sf mansion), and his houseboat, and stops flying around in a private G IV, then I’ll know its time to start worrying. Until then, global warming is just a liberal’s version of religion.
December 11th, 2009 at 10:41 am
#2 – the point of the post, and how I intrepret your response, is that we do not know enough about what is going on to make any serious investment in anything except improving the science. The science is not currently good enough to make decisions on.
I think we can, safely, however say that if we had to make a decision on data we have, we would operate on the assumption that cold is worse than warm, cold is more likely than warm – both historically and due to period situational events like volcanoes and meteor strikes.
A capitalistic, technical, and energy awash society can handle either better. So why would I want to become socialistic and energy deficient?
It makes NO SENSE.