More Glacier Studies Confirm Roman And Medieval Warm Periods Were Just As Warm As Today

Posted on October 30, 2014 by Curt ( 4 comments already! )

Sebastian Lüning and Fritz Vahrenholt:

Everywhere activists and climate alarmists are claiming climate change is happening faster than ever and that the earth is dangerously approaching a tipping point. For example Greenpeace likes to say that the glaciers are actually the “fever thermometers” measuring the health of the planet and that their melting tells the story of inevitable total meltdown. For example in the Alps glaciers have receded by almost a half since the year 1850. Greenpeace writes:

Foremost since the 1990s the rate of melt has increased and is expected to rise over the coming years: Today’s melting is being caused by greenhouse gas emissions from 30 years ago.”

But is glacier melt really something new and unexpected?

Greenpeace uses the Alps as a telltale example. It is precisely there that we want to carry out a fact-check. Firstly one has to wonder why the glacier melt in the Alps began already way back in 1850 – when anthropogenic CO2 couldn’t have played any significant role. This was already determined by geologist Albert Schreiner in 1997 in his textbook “Introduction to Quartiary Geology“ (p. 188, Fig. 91).

One finds even greater factual headaches when going back through the history of the climate for the last several thousand years. Already in earlier articles we wrote that the Alps glacier melted considerably during earlier warm periods.

The melt phases during the Medieval Warm Period 1000 years ago and during the Roman Warm Period 2000 years ago have been well documented (see our blog articles here and here. In April 2014 two more additional papers were published, which impressively confirmed the natural glacier dynamics.

In the Quaternary Science Reviews appeared a paper authored by a team led by Anaëlle Simonneau of the French University Orléans, which reconstructed the glacier movements in the French Alps over the last thousands of years. Here the scientists documented several glacier melt phases, which unsurprisingly included the Roman and Medieval warm periods (Figure1). What follows is an excerpt from the abstract:

0 0 votes

Article Rating

Name*

Email*

Name*

Email*

4 Comments

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

Bill

9 years ago

The opportunity to use the climate scam to take control of the world economy is quickly passing.

Larry+Weisenthal

9 years ago

What you guys have to keep in mind is that it’s GLOBAL (and not regional) warming.

For example, global warming has produced paradoxically cold winters in the upper Midwest through Northeastern US, owing to disruption of jet stream pattens (allowing for the “polar vortex”), even though 2014 is globally shaping up as the warmest year on record. During the so-called Medieval warm period, there was indeed warming in the North Atlantic region, but not in other parts of the globe.

Something like 90 – 95% of the globe’s heat is trapped in the ocean heat sinks, in any event. A lot of surface weather depends also on degree of upwelling of deeper ocean currents, which affect things like El Niño and the Gulfstream current which keeps most of Europe from being like Siberia.

– Larry Weisenthal/Huntington Beach CA

Bill

9 years ago

Yeah, yeah, yeah, we get it. If it warms, it’s warming. If it cools, it’s warming. If the climate does exactly the opposite of what the models predict, it’s warming. Basically, if those trying to justify control over the economy say it’s warming, it’s warming and no one is allowed to dispute it.

Ditto

9 years ago

@Larry+Weisenthal:

During the so-called Medieval warm period, there was indeed warming in the North Atlantic region, but not in other parts of the globe.

Scientists have found that the Medieval warming did indeed happen in other parts of the world.

Medieval warming WAS global – new science contradicts IPCC:

More peer-reviewed science contradicting the warming-alarmist “scientific consensus” was announced yesterday, as a new study shows that the well-documented warm period which took place in medieval times was not limited to Europe, or the northern hemisphere: it reached all the way to Antarctica.

The research involved the development of a new means of assessing past temperatures, to add to existing methods such as tree ring analysis and ice cores. In this study, scientists analysed samples of a crystal called ikaite, which forms in cold waters.

“Ikaite is an icy version of limestone,” explains earth-sciences prof Zunli Lu. “The crystals are only stable under cold conditions and actually melt at room temperature.”

Down in the Antarctic peninsula that isn’t a problem, and Lu and his colleagues were able to take samples which had been present for hundreds of years and date their formation. The structure of Ikaite, it turns out, varies measurably depending on the temperature when it forms, allowing boffins to construct an accurate past temperature record.

(Snip)

Lu and his colleagues’ new work, however, indicates that in fact the medieval warm period and little ice age were both felt right down to Antarctica.

“We showed that the Northern European climate events influenced climate conditions in Antarctica,” says the prof, who was at Oxford when most of the work was done but now has a position at Syracuse uni in the States. He and his colleagues write:

This ikaite record qualitatively supports that both the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age extended to the Antarctic Peninsula.

In other words, global warming has already occurred in historical, pre-industrial times, and then gone away again. Lu et al’s work is published in the peer-reviewed journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. ®
Something like 90 – 95% of the globe’s heat is trapped in the ocean heat sinks, in any event.

No Larry it isn’t NASA just destroyed your and Greg’s mythical “ocean deep sink” claim:

NASA Study Finds Earth’s Ocean Abyss Has Not Warmed

Many processes on land, air and sea have been invoked to explain what is happening to the “missing” heat. One of the most prominent ideas is that the bottom half of the ocean is taking up the slack, but supporting evidence is slim. This latest study is the first to test the idea using satellite observations, as well as direct temperature measurements of the upper ocean. Scientists have been taking the temperature of the top half of the ocean directly since 2005, using a network of 3,000 floating temperature probes called the Argo array.

“The deep parts of the ocean are harder to measure,” said JPL’s William Llovel, lead author of the study, published Sunday, Oct. 5 in the journal Nature Climate Change. “The combination of satellite and direct temperature data gives us a glimpse of how much sea level rise is due to deep warming. The answer is — not much.”