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Opinion 5,780 views

The Dinosaur Media Prematurely Bury Climate Warming Skeptics -- Again

By Patrick Michaels

The dinosaur media are—yet again—reporting the death of climate skeptics because of the latest, greatest paper published by Nature magazine. Increases of dreaded carbon dioxide appear to have preceded the warming that initiated human civilization.

For years, my less-green friends have pointed to the long ice cores in Antarctica, where annual striations go back hundreds of thousands of years. The temperature can be inferred from the relative abundance of common oxygen (16O) and its rarer isotope with two additional neutrons, 18O. In most cases, temperature changes before carbon dioxide does, seemingly inverting the normal cause and effect for the current climate rage.

Not so, say Jeremy Shakun, from Harvard, and his eight colleagues from around the world. They gathered up 80 so-called “proxy” indicators of local temperature (including the Antarctic ice cores), and compared them to the amount of carbon dioxide trapped in the ice. It appears that—after a little non-CO2 temperature rise of speculative origin—carbon dioxide increases indeed preceded the massive deglaciation that began about 20,000 years ago.

Shakun et al. argue that the Antarctic ice cores are a special case, where through a very complicated (and hard to verify) chain of causation, temperature will in fact increase before carbon dioxide.

Enter the internet, one of the greatest things that has ever happened to science. Because of requirement for increased data transparency (pushed, in no small part, by the Climategate gang’s reluctance to release theirs), the numbers behind important papers are now available online.

Willis Eschenbach, over at www.wattsupwiththat.com (a blog anyone interested in the climate issue should bookmark) got into the raw data—before it was sliced and diced into the very compelling graphics by Shakun et al. Warning: the following image is scientifically graphic and you might want to keep your greener friends away from it.

Each black dot is a temperature data point from the 80 proxies. The data are “standardized”—a common technique, to render their metrics commensurate. The average of each proxy is zero and the scatter about that mean is scaled to a value of one. The red dots are the carbon dioxide concentration in bubbles trapped in Greenland’s ice, about which there is little serious dispute.

It’s fair to say that the central core of the proxies is pretty concurrent with the carbon dioxide increase. It’s also fair to say that there is an awful lot of scatter in the proxy data. Finally, it’s fair to ask what all of this means for the future.

The third author on this paper, Andreas Schmittner, published something related two months ago, where, using a somewhat more global sample of proxies, he concluded that the likelihood of a very large warming this century from carbon dioxide is exceedingly small.

Click chart to enlarge

Willis Eschenbach’s plot of all the proxy data in Shakun et al., with ice-core carbon dioxide superimposed on a similar scale.

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  • fredlinn fredlinn 2 years ago

    “The Dinosaur Media ”

    Would that be the one covered with scales like the older idea of dinosaurs, or the one covered with downy, fuzzy, multicolored feathers more like Barney?

  • Kronocide Kronocide 2 years ago

    Patrick Michaels is the king of deniers, paid by the energy industry, inducing metric tons of noise and disinformation. ‘Skeptics’ they are not, deniers they are. The media should pay attention to real skeptics, not the faux skeptic deniers.

  • chl9 chl9 2 years ago

    It’s just more hockey stick whooey. Let them flap their lips. No one cars.

  • Start Loving Start Loving 2 years ago

    I’ll totally admit it. Despite several advanced degrees and decades of pondering such issues, I cannot begin to fathom how you’d want to keep company with the cigarette cancer deniers, the Canada Tar Sands aren’t causing cancer crowd, the black people like Jim Crow, black people like being slaves… hoards. You are not of the same species as I, and visa versa.

  • User_aab User_aab 2 years ago

    Start Loving,

    That’s all the crap you can come up with? If you make wild accusations, how about backing them up rather than talking out of your south end, you moron. Rather than decades of pondering, how about doing some critical thinking, nitwit.

  • Rick Newman Rick Newman 2 years ago

    You have to see the updated graph http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/04/07/shakun-redux-master-tricksed-us-i-told-you-he-was-tricksy/#more-60932

  • xenocog xenocog 2 years ago

    Fascinating responses. Fascinating because of their remarkable consistency in lacking anything resembling data and their reliance on the much-more-appropriate devices of name-calling and, I suspect, nose-thumbing to make their points. Regrettably, I don’t do well at name-calling and will have to suffice with the much-less-appreciated device of referring to data.

    Though occasionally and fleetingly mentioned in the press, Earth is currently in an ice age. This is a very well-established fact, based on multiply-replicated data acquired by the use of a variety of proxies. This ice age is characterized by repeated, lengthy periods of frigid conditions lasting roughy 100,000-125 ,000 years with brief, 10,000-15,000 year warm spells called “interglacials.” We are in one such interglacial now. During the frigid periods, ice covers much of North America. Last time around, the area that would become New York City was under a mile-thick layer of ice. Detroit’s location was under a layer of ice two miles thick.

    The periodicity of these glacial-interglacial cycles can be seen at globalwarmingart.com –> Featured Galleries –> Past Temperatures. Look at “Ice Age Temperature Changes” and you can see that the last 4 interglacials were warmer than our own. To really have some fun, take your favorite image-editing program, duplicate the graph and slide it over by one glacial cycle. Your results may vary, but mine suggested that things could start getting cold very soon.

    Look at the other graphs. In “Holocene Temperature Variations,” which shows climate since the end of the last glaciation, you can see that it is colder now than it was between about 6,000 and 8,000 years ago, and that there were two other warmer periods about 5,000 years ago. Again, your mileage may vary, but I see global cooling, not warming. Not convinced? Try a look at the graph showing the entire period since the demise of the non-avian dinosaurs, “65 Million Years of Climate Change.” It shows the same trend, towards cooling, not warming, and it’s a big trend. Finally, take a very long-term look at “Phanerozoic Climate Change” and you’ll see that the last time our planet was this cold was over 400 million years ago, a time when complex life had not yet made the transition to land. It was also the time of the Ordovician-Silurian extinction event, the second-largest in the history of Earth. It was not a coincidence.

    To those who contend that our biodiversity is impoverished, I agree, but that impoverishment began before our species evolved. Consider: if you were tasked with photographing biodiversity today, where would you look? I would head towards the tropics. Heat is energy, and to experiment with diverse solutions to the challenges of survival, nature needs abundant energy. The decline in biodiversity can be dated to about the end of the Eocene Optimum, prominent on the “65 Million Years” graph. At the peak of the eocene Optimum, there were boas, alligators and soft-shelled turtles living on Ellesmere Island. Ellesmere Island is the tenth-largest island on the planet, yet today its population (not including researchers) is 146. Why? because it’s located about as far north of the Arctic Circle as Buffalo is north of Savannah. Impoverishment loves the cold. Pray for warmth.

  • dallasdunlap dallasdunlap 2 years ago

    The Schmittner paper, beloved by confusionists like Michaels, finds a climate sensitivity on the low side of the error bars, based on research about the Last Glacial Maximum. An interesting ramification is that all that change occurred not because of a 7 degree temperature change, but becuse of a 3 degree change.
    IOW, the difference between now and the last ice age is only 3 degrees.
    I suppose if I were being paid by the oil industry, I could find some comfort in that.

  • Will Will 2 years ago

    Even more relevant is CO2 in the last 5000 years, which Eschenbach shows increased while temperature decreased (also at wattsupwiththat), and CO2 in the modern era, which Salby’s talk at the Sydney Institute shows is actually determined by temperature.

  • cacattack cacattack 2 years ago

    Patrick… I’m a little confused. What is the connection between the first part of your piece (on the new paper that shows CO2 precedes global warming globally, if not in Antarctica), and the second part of your piece, related to climate sensitivities? The only link I can see is that Scmittner was involved in both studies. Why is that relevant?

    Also, your interpretation of the earlier Schmittner study is quite different from Scmittner’s own interpretation. He said “Hence, drastic changes over land can be expected. However, our study implies that we still have time to prevent that from happening, if we make a concerted effort to change course soon.” http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/11/111124150827.htm. Hence, according to the scientist himself, his study hardly supports the “policy” of doing nothing about CO2 emissions And just letting technology develop on its own (apparently, from your perspective, without government subsidies).

    And, um… What’s “dinosaur media”?